FreeBSD has recently announced plans to drop big-endian Power from the next release.Well, looks like there is only one user now... And I don't actually have a use case, so no real users.
Right now, I have a work around for the worst issue (broken Ethernet), so I might just bear with the current state and leisurely try to patch the drivers for big endian.
Interestingly, just like changing the margins in a written document and reflowing the paragraphs makes previously unseen errors evident, running in big-endian mode can reveal software mistakes that affect little-endian systems.
In the race to the bottom, we no longer understand or even read the source, but instead verify it works in the test cases and then extrapolate that it must work all the time. Although, it's easy to maliciously hide bad behaviour, big-endian still makes a good test case for correctness.
Unfortunately, nobody tests things either.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Wed Dec 03, 2025 12:31 am