> I keep seeing references to big endian and little endian. I am going to > show off my ignorance here and ask - What does this mean? I do not know > what the term endian means.
Basically, it is how numbers are stored ... if i have the number 0x01020304 and I store it in memory ... will it be stored as [1][2][3][4] ... which is big endian ... or will it be stored as [4][3][2][1] ... which is little endian. On little endian architecture (e.g. i386)... when you read the numeric into a register or store a number from a register to memory ... the number gets byte/word swapped and you can find Linux byte swap macros that can handle this for you. -Don
