On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:22:30AM +0000, Markos Chandras wrote:
> >>> What would use this? Or in other words, why is this needed?
> >>
> >> It was a patch I started including years ago in Gentoo's mips-sources, and just
> >> never thought much about. I know it was submitted several times in the past,
> >> but I can't recall what, if any objection was ever made. No harm in sending it
> >> in again...
> >
> > Clarification, submitted several times in the past by others. I think I sent
> > it in once prior, but never got review or feedback.
> >
> I believe this patch is mostly useful for cores that can boot in both LE
> and BE so being able to tell the byteorder from cpuinfo can be helpful
> at times. Having readelf and other tools in your userland may not always
> be the case, but you surely have "cat" :)
>
> So that patch looks good to me but i think the #ifdefs can be avoided.
> Can we use
>
> if (config_enabled(CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN) {
> } else {
> }
>
> stuff instead?
Exactly the code Joshua is submitting is what has been there until commit
874124ebb630 (Merge with Linux 2.4.15.) in 2001. One reason to remove it
was that I had a prototype of a kernel supporting the execution of
application of native and the other byte order working and the field in
/proc/cpuinfo was plain lying in that case. Not a terribly relevant
reason in retrospective but I'm wondering if just in case we should
rename the field to kernel_byteorder?
Ralf
