The Open Firmware specs explicitly state that the frame buffer must
be big endian.
And this means?
Nothing stops you from using the frame buffer in little endian mode in
the kernel. On Sparc we do many things which are against the
environment OpenFirmware expects.
But when we must go into the OpenFirmware we restore much of the
environment (in fact if you break out to the firmware prompt, we
restore the palette of the framebuffer etc.).
Also you can use different mappings for the frame buffer than what the
firmware uses.
All in all, firmware can say all it wants, it has no bearing on how
the kernel accesses the framebuffer, and thus it should not tie our
hands about how we do so.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com
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