Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ccut!wnoc-tyo-news!cs.titech!titccy.cc.titech!necom830!mohta
From: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: bi-endian environments
Message-ID: <173@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp>
Date: 10 May 91 06:27:49 GMT
References: <159@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp> <3225@spim.mips.COM> <168@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp> <3308@spim.mips.COM>
Sender: news@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp
Distribution: comp
Organization: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Lines: 24

In article <3308@spim.mips.COM> cprice@mips.com (Charlie Price) writes:

>You cannot share *arbitrary* binary data transparently through
>either shared memory or the filesystem.

So, I have been explicitely talking about sharing of a byte stream from
the begining.

>If a memory-mapped file page or shared memory segment page is accessed
>by processes that have different endian-ness, the page has to be put into
>the proper character-stream order before the access can be granted.
>
>This would be very expensive for highly-shared accesses,
>so I suspect people won't do it very much.

Yes, this is THE problem. And you have a slooow workaround.

>Fortunately, most file access, mapped or otherwise, doesn't involve
>a high degree of simultaneous access by several processes.

Well, for example, without NIS, look up of mapped /etc/passwd will be
considerably slowed down.

						Masataka Ohta