[fpc-devel] help with softfloat for arm big endian crosscompiler

Daniël Mantione daniel.mantione at freepascal.org
Wed Dec 13 11:55:10 CET 2006



Op Wed, 13 Dec 2006, schreef Micha Nelissen:

> Michael Schnell wrote:
> > > In theory yes, in practice probably not.
> > In the ARM-Linux developers list I have been told that ARM always is used
> > in little endian mode. I have no idea why.
> 
> Intel XScale (at least) is used as big-endian arm.

Hola, most modern ARM cpu's support big endian, that is not the point. 
Question is how many an big endian platforms exists, and this is not so 
popular, because even if you switch the cpu to big endian, the underlying 
hardware remains little endian (with the cpu doing the conversion). This 
means that driver code etc. suddenly needs to care about endian 
conversions.

An Intel Xscale system running Linux or Windows CE is always running in 
little endian mode, which propably covers an already important part of 
the ARM cpu's  in use.

Daniël


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