From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
To: ac131313@cygnus.com (Andrew Cagney)
Cc: qqi@world.std.com, fche@redhat.com, gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com
Subject: Re: [remote] Make registers network byteordered?
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:59:00 -0000
Message-id: <200103211051.CAA14665@shell17.ba.best.com>
References: <3A2ED523.70DCA415@cygnus.com>
X-SW-Source: 2001-03/msg00225.html

Another December twin-dilemma time warp victim...

> Even when you know the target, you may not know its current byte order. 
> I must admit, thought, that it is a very rare situtation to be trying to
> debug a target that switches its byte order.
> 
> Oh, and I've seen people debug targets using the wrong GDB.  Sick yes,
> but it does work.

Commercial debuggers in the USA embedded market generally detect endianness
on startup, or design the issue out of their protocols by using a "network
byte order" concept or endian-neutral formats (like bigendian hex ascii).

Switching endianness after startup is rare, except possibly on bi-endian
targets that set bits at runtime or have memory spaces which can select
the endianness (i960 Cx core series...)  Sounds like a job for JTC's memory
attributes!

In any case, I consider hard-compiled endian assumptions to be disgusting.
It should always be possible to force a specific endianness in the case
where the auto-detect fails for any reason, but it's lame to rely on people
picking the right configure option or typing "set endianness" all the time...

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com