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Linus Torvalds Lashes Out At RISC-V Big Endian Plans (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/linux@programming.dev
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Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel.

In response to a mailing list comment whether RISC-V big endian "BE" patches being worked on would be able to make it for this current Linux kernel cycle. Linus Torvalds initially wrote:

"Oh Christ. Is somebody seriously working on BE support in 2025?

WHY?

Seriously, that sounds like just stupid. Is there some actual real reason for this, or is it more of the "RISC-V is used in academic design classes and so people just want to do endianness for academic reasons"?

Because I'd be more than happy to just draw a line in the sand and say "New endianness problems are somebody ELSES problem", and tell people to stop being silly.

Let's not complicate things for no good reason. And there is NO reason to add new endianness.

RISC-V is enough of a mess with the millions of silly configuration issues already. Don't make it even worse.

Tell people to just talk to their therapists instead. That's much more productive."

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[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

Mmmmm I don't understand any of that lol

The mainline kernel is for mainline development. Not for random experiments that make the world a worse place.

And yes, we're open source, and that very much means that anybody is more than welcome to try to prove me wrong.

If it turns out that BE RISC-V becomes a real thing that is relevant and actually finds a place in the RISC-V ecosystem, then of_course we should support it at that point in the mainline kernel.

But I really do think that it actually makes RISC-V only worse, and that we should not actively help the fragmentation."

I was worried this meant he was voicing disapproval for RISC-V in general, but he's actually just taking about an implementation or maybe particular part instruction set or something?

I'd be curious how other RISC-V knowledgeable folks feel, whether they agree or disagree

[-] Eldritch@piefed.world 29 points 3 days ago

Big endian is a byte order scheme. For registers and memory. If I'm not mistaken, pretty much all modern systems these days are little endian. The differences can largely be mitigated at the operating system level. But it definitely invites new chaos back into the equation. If programs don't get their bytes in the right order, it will be garbage in garbage out everywhere. Try playing an old PCM wave file from a 68k based Macintosh or Amiga on a PC.

[-] calliope@retrolemmy.com 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Try playing an old PCM wave file from a 68k based Macintosh or Amiga on a PC.

I really appreciate how specific this is. It sounds like it’s from experience.

[-] Eldritch@piefed.world 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It 100% is. I have distinct memories back in the 80s of getting a hold of files off of FidoNet, etc. and trying to play them only to find out they were big endian files. It sounded like a mildly uncomfortable shoggoth in a blender. It had nothing on the dulcet tones of dial up modems.

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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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