Endian-ness of Alpha

From: Nikola Milutinovic <Nikola.Milutinovic_at_ev.co.yu>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 08:01:22 +0200

Hi all.

One quck question: Is Alpha Big or Little Endian machine?

I'm having troubles with Heimdal 0.6.3 on my Tru64 4.0D (I know it is
ancient, but I have 10 servers which we will not upgrade, I think).

For some reason I became suspicious when Heimdal's configure script
recognized my Alpha as Little Endian, dunno why.

I tested it a bit and found out that compiler, on it's own believes the
Alpha to be Big Endian. But in "/usr/include/machine/endian.h" it sets
defines to little endian:

#define LITTLE_ENDIAN 1234 /* least-significant byte first (vax) */
#define BIG_ENDIAN 4321 /* most-significant byte first (IBM, net) */
#define PDP_ENDIAN 3412 /* LSB first in word, MSW first in long (pdp) */

/* MIPS may use either endian, compiler tells us which. */
#define BYTE_ORDER LITTLE_ENDIAN

Normally, I would believe the machines environment, but since I'm having
one of heimdal's test fail entirely (snprintf) on what suspiciously
looks like byte-ordering/64-bit-ness/endian-ness, I started digging.

Nix.
Received on Tue Oct 19 2004 - 07:04:09 NZDT

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