Tests great! Less swapping! Tests great! Less swapping!
um...
I favor big endian for the mips project for two reasons:
1. Binary compatibility hacks with other Mips systems will be
impossible or incredibly difficult otherwise.
2. It would be a very good idea to leverege off the architectural independence
work of the 68000 port. I am not talking about a port of their port, rather
that we work in tandem with them in building a portable linux source tree.
And the neat thing is, they're allready dealing with the little-big-endian
issue.
3. I like big-endian. (Not a reason. A bias.)
The problem I see is with interfacing with the ISA bus. The software will have
to know how to
deal with the endianness, or there will have to be a hardware swap.
Does the nifty bus controller already deal with that?
How much more difficult would this make writing device drivers?
If SCSI, ethernet and video are on the motherboard, I think that we don't need
to invent
another super-nifty multi-cool expansion slot system.
a) that is hard
b) we probably wouldn't get it right the first time
c) most of the fast stuff is already on the motherboard
I agree that an ISA bus would be neat and allow us to put lots of
clone cards in the system, but I could live even without this.
However, I feel that we should run every line going to the cpu also
to some sort of connector. Just one. A bunch of other signals can
go to/come from this slot, but the important thing is to allow
someone else, later, to put a daughter card there that perhaps
can do the nifty bus stuff, or whatever. Perhaps someone
would like to make an AXP daughtercard. Or a 486 card to allow
running of Linux binaries. Make it simple. Don't worry about
how others might use it. And the great thing is, it is just
the cost of a (perhaps very big) connector. Cheap. Which I
appreciate.
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