Hi all,
during recent patch review
(https://gerrit.osmocom.org/c/osmo-trx/+/33737) the topic of continuing
to maintain support for big endian machines has come up.
While traditionally I've always been a strong proponent of writing
portable code that can run also on big endian systems, it is not the
year 2003 or 2008 anymore, and PowerPC (the main big endian platform) is
dead by now, as is SPARC. Not just in newly-built processors, but also
in existing and still operating machines, at least of the class that
would run our code.
So unless somebody objects with strong arguments, I'd propose to
officially and explicitly drop supporting big endian systems from
osmocom CNI projects.
>From what I can tell, this would primarily mean
* drop the struct_endianness check from the commit verification
* removing all our struct_endianness-generated or other code that
explicitly adds big endian support
* adding some kind of #warning or even #error to a common libosmocore
header file if anyone tries to build on big endian
This obviously doesn't mean we can abandon using [osmo_]{htonl,ntohl},
as network byte order is still network byte order.
Regards,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <lafo...@gnumonks.org> https://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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