Endianness of freeBSD

[Christian Weisgerber]

Heiko Wundram (Beenic) <wundram at beenic.net> wrote:

> > Alpha is little endian. i had alpha 21066 running linux.
> 
> Not true. Alpha is big- or little-endian (so, it's bi-endian),

Alpha is little-endian in practice.  I've never heard of DEC--or
anybody else for that matter--building a big-endian alpha.  Note
that DEC's previous CPU architecture, the VAX, was also little-endian.

> depending on how it's booted,

... on how _the CPU_ is booted, yes.  By the time you are running
firmware and thinking of booting an operating system, it's much too
late.

> and IIRC the Windows NT version running on Alpha used the 
> big-endian mode of the CPU. But I might be mistaken.

I think you are mistaken.  The ARC MIPS platform, which Windows NT
originally was written for, was also little-endian.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de