Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!amdahl!amdcad!crackle!tim
From: tim@crackle.amd.com (Tim Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Rx000 byteorder
Message-ID: <24152@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 89 23:38:43 GMT
References: <76@melba.oz>
Sender: news@amdcad.AMD.COM
Reply-To: tim@amd.com (Tim Olson)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 21
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In article <76@melba.oz> gnb@melba.bby.oz.au writes:
| With regard to DEC using the MIPS chip in little-endian mode:
| 
| Is it reasonably simple to provide a binary translator to change
| a big-endian binary to a little-endian binary?  Could you then
| easily recognise system calls and convert them?

This is difficult unless you know the "natural sizes" of all of the data
items.  For example, if you want to convert data from big-endian to
little-endian, you must swap bytes within half-words, and swap
half-words within words, but you don't do anything to byte-sized data
(strings, as well).

If you have an unstripped binary with debug information, then you can
derive the data sizes from it, but it is probably not possible with
stripped binaries.


	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim@crackle.amd.com)