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question about the little-endian in sparc

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Operating Systems Solaris question about the little-endian in sparc
# 1  
Old 11-20-2008
question about the little-endian in sparc
hi folks, in the sparc v9 manul , it says it is possible to access the memory data in little-endian mode, but there is only privilaged instruction that could set the PSTATE ( the cle bit ) regist. if I'm in the user mode , is it possible for me to access the data in little-endian mode?
# 2  
Old 11-21-2008
No, the OS determines the endian type for the system. This feature is so that you could more easily port a little endian OS to a sparc cpu. Ideally, you should ignore endianness. Solaris is both little endian on intel and big endian on sparc. A well written program will work in either version.
# 3  
Old 11-22-2008
You can't from user mode because, as you already noticed, this instruction is privileged. You can't even do it unless you implement your own system call as there is no support for doing it under Solaris.

That little endian mode was designed to allow porting Windows NT to the SPARC architecture, a port which obviously was never released.
http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/sun-info/sun...and-Windows-NT
# 4  
Old 11-22-2008
Great link! I had a suspicion that this feature was implemented with NT in mind, but I didn't think that I would ever see any proof of that.
# 5  
Old 11-23-2008
is there some solaris os using little-endian mode ? if the open-solaris support intel x86 cpu , then there must exist some solaris os supporting little-endian mode, but I'm not sure if I can install it on sparc system.
# 6  
Old 11-23-2008
The Solaris source code is portable to SPARC and x86/x64. It is always built on big endian when on SPARC and little endian when on x86/x64.

Compiling the SPARC kernel in little endian would probably be quite a complex (and useless?) task. I'm not sure how hardware support would be impacted.

What exactly are you trying to achieve ?
# 7  
Old 11-23-2008
MAybe the OP needs htonl() --
htonl

The function itself will not help Solaris is big endian and so is the "network", but there are lots of examples of code out there that switches endian-ness (endianity?)
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