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

[Will Deacon]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 12:15:44PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 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.

I didn't even know about that! I'll see if it spots anything I missed...

Will