[SunRescue] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000 Ed.Mitchell at centigram.com wrote:

> The eerie part is running into people that don't understand endian-ness or
> why it should even matter.  As an aside, I recently read that the PowerPC
> arch doesn't give a rat's behind about the endianess expectations of
> software executing on it.  On other words, it seems to be able to figure
> out what endian-ness your data is in and can act accordingly.  Anyone shed
> light on this?

Modern PPC is bi-endian (as is UltraSparc) and can operate in either mode. 
You have to explicitly set the mode, though, there's no way for the CPU to
figure it out automagically. 

All UltraSparc based systems from Sun use big-endian mode exclusively.

-James