On Friday 27 May 2005 15:58, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 03:35:41PM +0200, Marco Canini wrote: > > I've an IXP2400 based PCI card. > > Inside the IXP2400 there's an Intel XScale processor. > > I would like to run Debian ARM on it, but as far as I understand Debian > > ARM is little endian. Is there a way to get a big endian version of > > Debian ARM? My need for big endian is because the IXP2400 is a multi-core > > processor which has 8 processors called Microengine running in big > > endian. > > I thought the arm procesors (and the xscale) were only little endian > capable. > > Even if the arm can do big endian, it certainly isn't something > currently supported and probably won't be. > > I know the PPC can do both ways and the kernel developers have been very > clear they have no intension of ever doing the other option on the PPC. > > Do the microengine processors run arm instructions? I rather doubt it, > in which case as long as you convert the data when exchanging between > the xscale and the microengines you should be fine. One of the two > probably even has instructions to do so efficiently, unless the chip was > badly designed (I doubt that somewhat). > > The arm wants little endian, so that's what you should run. Whatever > programs you load into the microengines is different since they aren't > linux programs and they aren't arm programs (as far as I can tell) so > their endianess doesn't matter. Trying to change the endianess of a cpu > and its OS just to avoid a few byte swaps does not make sense at all. > Normally you would be right but in the case of IXP2400 this's not necessarily true. Indeed the IXP2400 is a network processor and here is employed to transmit data at 3 Gbps. In my case I've no problems in making byte swaps, but I had preferred not to. However in general making byte swaps for every packet you process would result in a performance loss.
Considering that it's an embedded system with nfs root fs, serial console and network access, what is the suggested/simplest method to install Debian ARM? Thanks > Len Sorensen -- Marco Canini -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
