DragonFly on Power9?

[Pierre Abbat]

On Sunday, 13 January 2019 20.56.08 EST Gerald Henriksen wrote:
> Why do you want to do big-endian testing?

One of the Bezitopo programs reads geoid files in various formats and converts 
them to a common format so that the main Bezitopo program doesn't have to read 
many different formats. One of the input formats is the NGS format: https://
www.ngs.noaa.gov/GEOID/GEOID12B/GEOID12B_data.shtml . "The binary formats of 
the Unix format data files follow the IEEE Std. 754 binary format (big-
endian), as they are developed in a Unix environment." To make sure that 
convertgeoid can read both endians, I got Alaska, Guam, and Samoa in big-
endian and Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Lower 48 in little-endian. But I haven't 
run the program on a big-endian machine.

> Big-endian is essentially dead, with Fedora (which for years has
> offered both BE and LE Power) dropping big-endian support due to both
> a lack of resources and the fact that new Power based projects are LE.
> 
> Red Hat EL 8 is LE only on Power.
> 
> And IBM itself started the process to switch Power to being a LE only
> platform due to client/vendor desires 4 years ago:
> 
> https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/fe313521-2e95-46f2-817d-4
> 4a4f27eba32/entry/just_the_faqs_about_little_endian?lang=en

That page states "No, there will be no effect on AIX or IBM i application 
environments as a result of this change." AIX on Power is big-endian. AIX is a 
Unix and should therefore run Bezitopo (and Quadlods and any other software I 
write on Linux or BSD) without change.

Pierre
-- 
Lanthanidia deliciosa: What the kiwifruit would be
if it weren't so radioactive.