Subject: Re: A question about architecture and byte order.

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 19:15:18 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Erik Troan wrote:
> No you're probably right -- I just know nothing about mips ;-) Any objections
> to a mipsel arch folks?

There's been no objections to having a mipsel architecture, so it's safe
to assume that we can go ahead.

Because this isn't reported in uname, there'll have to be some additions
made to ./configure to test the default byte order, and set the arch to
mips or mipsel accordingly. 

Also, it looks like there's going to have to be some work done on
lib/rpmrc.c in defaultMachine().

I'll work on patches for those over the weekend, they shouldn't be
difficult to do.

Now, as for mipsbi, the architecture that would be able to run both mips
and mipsel... I think the only way to test this is to attempt to run
binaries of both byteorders.  I don't quite know how to do this without
including precompiled binaries of both byteorders.  Maybe something like
including a precompiled stream of bytes.  It'll be ugly, though.  Please
let me know if you know of a non-OS specific way of doing this.

- A

      Alex deVries          Rent this space for a $5 donation 
  System Administrator      to EngSoc per day.
   The EngSoc Project       Send spam to [email-masked].

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 07:29:55 +0100

> mips or mipsel accordingly. 

The copy of config.guess in the rpm sources is very old.  The FSF's copy
recognices mips{el}-*-linux correctly since a year or so ...

> let me know if you know of a non-OS specific way of doing this.

For now mipsbi is a pretty theoretical construct.  To my knowledge the
only biendian implementation of an operating system on MIPS has been
Risc/OS 6 which has never been released to the public.  So no code
necessary at all :-)  If I ever implement it for Linux then I'll make
the bi-endian option somehow detectable.

The other issue I was thinking about is that we currently have rpms
of both byteorder using the same filename and archtecture identifier
inside the file.  Maybe changing the architecture for the bigendian
packages also to mipseb would reduce the danger of people cutting
them into their fingers by installing the wrong package?

  Ralf