Software and hardware obsolescence in the kernel

Posted Aug 30, 2020 18:41 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231)
In reply to: Software and hardware obsolescence in the kernel by karkhaz
Parent article: Software and hardware obsolescence in the kernel

No, little-endian means the least significant byte comes first, at the lowest address. The analogy to reading a number is that the most significant digit is read first, thus the number is "big-endian". (Whether the first digit is to the left or right does not matter, and both Arabic and Western numbers are written with the most significant digit to the left.)

Software and hardware obsolescence in the kernel

Posted Oct 14, 2020 10:50 UTC (Wed) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

So an 8-bit x86 processor could be called big-endian if it reads the MSB first?

I don't think so.

Software and hardware obsolescence in the kernel

Posted Oct 14, 2020 18:31 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> So an 8-bit x86 processor could be called big-endian if it reads the MSB first?

Yes, the serialization of the word on the 8-bit bus would be accurately labeled big-endian if the MSB is transferred first—not that this would be observable to software. The storage would still be little-endian since the LSB is stored at the lowest-numbered address. This can be confirmed by accessing the same memory address with byte- and word-oriented instructions.