SUMMARY: sun byte order

From: Darryl Pace (dpace@tacticsus.com)
Date: Fri Apr 17 1998 - 08:43:10 CDT


Thank you to all who replied. They were:
Casper Dik
Renny Koshy
Robert G. Ferrell **
Paul H. Yoshimune
Peter L. Wargo
Rob Windsor
Mike Salehi
Francois Leclerc
Wolf Schaefer

The question I asked, along with the most complete reply I received (from
Robert Ferrell) are both below.

>What's the byte order in Solaris (big endian?)? Please give >details.

Solaris is big-endian, meaning that numbers that take up multiple bytes
are
stored with the uppermost byte at the lowest numbered address. Since TCP
defines the byte ordering for network data, end-nodes must call a
processor-specific convert utility (which would do nothing if the
machine's
native byte-ordering is the same as TCP's) that acts on the TCP and IP
header information only. In a TCP/IP packet, the first transmitted data is

the most significant byte.

>Also, is this different in HP-UX (sorry about bringing HP in >this)?

Most UNIXes (for example, all System V) and the Internet are Big Endian.
Motorola 680x0 microprocessors (and therefore Macintoshes),
Hewlett-Packard
PA-RISC, and Sun SuperSPARC processors are Big Endian. The Silicon
Graphics
MIPS and IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors are both Little and Big Endian
(bi-endian).



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