big nedian or little endian?

[Clive Davies <cdavies@altera.com>]

I'm looking at trying to port Linux to an embedded MIPs target and I see in
the arch/mips/Makefile that there is an option to build both big and little
endian versions of the kernel. The question I have is whether both will
work, or whether I should aim to use one in preference to the other and
configure my hardware appriopriately.

TIA 
Clive