Endianness

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Revision as of 12:48, 22 February 2023 by JeremyRand (talk | contribs) (Security)
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All POWER CPU's from POWER3 onward support both big-endian (BE) and little-endian (LE) modes.[1] This is in contrast to x86, which supports only little-endian mode.

Operating System Support

Some distros only support BE; others only support LE; others support both. See the Operating System Compatibility List to check support in your preferred distro.

Security

BE mode has a security advantage over LE mode: there exist certain classes of memory-safety bugs (e.g. accessing a variable with the wrong data size) that typically cause an immediate crash (or otherwise obviously-wrong behavior) in BE mode, but instead manifest as silent security vulnerabilities in LE mode. Theoretically, it is likely that a sanitizer could achieve similar security benefits in LE mode, but such a sanitizer would have a performance impact that usage of BE mode would not incur. (Also, no such sanitizer is currently known to exist.)

References