Re: [PATCH 00/12] arm64: Remove unused big-endian support

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2026, at 11:47, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 05:11:47PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026, at 16:01, Will Deacon wrote:
>>
>> My suggestions there was to possibly remove arm32 big-endian mode at
>> the same time as on arm64, but that does feel a little rushed if
>> ixp4xx only has one release of supporting both, and removing be8
>> but leaving be32 for a little while longer is probably not worth it.
>
> Yeah, maybe give it another LTS on the arm32 side? I think arm64 going
> first is ok, though.

Right, one more LTS for 32-bit is probably good. We'll see how the
OpenWRT/ixp4xx conversion goes for users.

My feeling so far is that running ixp4xx in LE mode is probably fine
(there may still be driver bugs), but flashing a running system
from one mode to the other is a bit risky and BE32 mode makes this
more confusing the BE8.

>> > I've broken this down into fairly coarse chunks, as it seemed a lot
>> > easier to manage than one giant patch (even with the Kconfig being
>> > effectively disabled already) and not all of it is just mindless
>> > deletion. Despite that, I'm anticipating the whole thing going via the
>> > arm64 tree.
>> 
>> I would have done even larger patches, this does already feel fairly
>> fine-grained to me ;-). I had a look at the individual patches to make
>> sure this all makes sense, and I found nothing wrong here.
>
> If it was just a sed script or similar, I think I'd would've done a giant
> patch, but some of it is surprisingly error-prone (e.g. when you have a
> file with a load of '#ifdef CPU_BIG_ENDIAN' and then an '#ifndef
> CPU_BIG_ENDIAN' hiding in the middle of it all).

Yes, definitely, I've found out the hard way during other feature
removal before.

scripts/unifdef.c should be able to help with this, but I never
remember that this is a thing.

     Arnd