Subj : enigma on M68K linux
To   : Vorlon
From : Oli
Date : Mon Jan 16 2023 11:20 pm

Vorlon wrote (2023-01-16):

 V> Hello Digital!

 V> 15 Jan 23 12:25, you wrote to Oli:

 >>> Not much support for legacy or big-endian platforms.

 DM>> All PPC, most MIPS and some ARM systems are big-endian.

All three architectures are big-endian AND little-endian.

 V> I've read that some or all ARM chips can be switched to work in either mode.

ARM is 99,9% little-endian on desktop, server and mobile. Notable exception is NetBSD 10 (beta) which has the big-endian ports aarch64eb and earm*eb -- because they can. I'm running a Raspberry Pi in big-endian mode, maybe I'll try to compile nodejs (I'm quite confident the build fails).

MIPS is used both ways. I'm not sure if most CPUs work in both modes. AFAIK it depends on the board / firmware. Loongson MIPS-based CPUs are little-endian only.

PowerPC used to be used in big-endian mode (Power Mac G5 was big-endian only), but IBM and the big distros have pushed it to little-endian. Most distros dropped PPC and PPC64 big-endian. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Alpine only offer big-endian (>= POWER8). I guess no Google Chrome/Chromium and no nodejs for big-endian PPC/PPC64 was a huge incentive to switch to PPC64le. Also Firefox added nodejs as a hard build dependency and was not available anymore.

Summary: AFAIK nodejs does not support ARM big-endian. MIPS 32-bit has been removed; no idea if MIPS64 BE is working. No support for PPC 32-bit and older PPC64(be) machines. There are some patches though:

https://nitter.se/jhamby/status/1495188071632965637
https://jakehamby.com/2021/12/27/retrocomputing-powerpc-part-1/

( He also mentioned Enigma½ in a Tweet:
  https://nitter.se/jhamby/status/1529157067008667648#m )


Unfortunately nodejs will most likely never run on m68k.


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