Any modern Big-endian laptops to run BSD on?

[barracuda156]

Anything portable Big-endian and recent? I do have a couple of PowerBooks, but G4s are pretty slow.
Bi-endian which could be switched to Big-endian mode will do, of course.

 

[casperes1996]

Why do you need big-endianness?

You may be able to run an ARM device in ARM-be8 mode. The TEXT segment will still be little-endian but DATA will be big-endian and load/store instructions will inherently work with big-endian in that mode, though constants inlined in the text segment will still be little-endian along with opcodes. ARM also has a rev instruction to reverse a word's byte-order.

I doubt you'll find a laptop with a native big-endian operational mode out there though. I think your best bet if you absolutely need that is a modern Power system that you SSH into from a "regular" laptop. Maybe you can cobble together something custom resembling a laptop with some embedded chips that run big-endian but yeah, not really

For most things, little-endian just has some efficiency wins that can't quite be ignored. Frankly a mistake that the web uses big-endian

 

[maflynn]

Anything portable Big-endian and recent?

Not that I'm aware of.
You have your choice between, X86 (little endian) or ARM (little endian)

Why do you care about big or little endian? Endianness has no perceived value or benefit, particularly in modern computing

AFAIK, G3/G4 were big endian but current hardware is on orders of magnatude faster, i.e., geek bench scores of 1,300 vs. 14,000 for a M2 MBP

 

[barracuda156]

You have your choice between, X86 (little endian) or ARM (little endian)

Well, there are also some MIPS-based laptops, though I suspect they may be LE as well. Unfortunately, a project to make a PowerPC one is proceeding slowly at best.

P. S. Yeah, I am aware that presently endianness is pretty much inconsequential (at least BE would not be a practically noticeable improvement over LE), but for testing purposes it still makes sense.

 

[barracuda156]

Why do you need big-endianness?

From a practical point of view, for testing (without a need for a VM). From a personal preferences point of view, BE is the right one

You may be able to run an ARM device in ARM-be8 mode.

This is what I thought about, and at least NetBSD has an ARM BE target, however I am also unaware of actual devices on ARM which can be used in BE mode. Apple Silicon cannot, from look of things.

For most things, little-endian just has some efficiency wins that can't quite be ignored. Frankly a mistake that the web uses big-endian

IMO it was a mistake to fall into copying x86 here, but this is not a point of my post. (And yeah, with modern hardware differences won’t be practically noticeable anyway.)

 

[casperes1996]

From a practical point of view, for testing (without a need for a VM). From a personal preferences point of view, BE is the right one



This is what I thought about, and at least NetBSD has an ARM BE target, however I am also unaware of actual devices on ARM which can be used in BE mode. Apple Silicon cannot, from look of things.



IMO it was a mistake to fall into copying x86 here, but this is not a point of my post. (And yeah, with modern hardware differences won’t be practically noticeable anyway.)

I think most ARM chips support AArch64_BE8; But some will require to only run in BE mode if they do, can't run userspace BE and kernel LE or whatnot. It's true Apple's chips don't support BE mode. But I think most others do. Like Raspberry Pi's chips.

As for MIPS aren't they also bi-endian these days?

 

[barracuda156]

As for MIPS aren't they also bi-endian these days?

MIPS in principle is supposed to be bi-endian, but I think Chinese MIPS are LE, and I am not aware of other modern MIPS-based laptops.