• Network Infrastructure,  Unix

    Big-endian vs. Little-endian

    Endianness is the bit/byte ordering (thus aka byte ordering) used to store values, typically in regard to memory and streams of data over a network. This comes up occasionally with heterogenous integration and the bugs that can result. Basically, little-endian is used with the x86 chipset and big-endian is used for the PowerPC line, although in some cases PowerPC can be bi-endian, meaning that it can switch endianness. Well, it doesn’t actually do so from a hardware standpoint but instead when they’re in little-endian mode the software is little-endian, but multi-byte values end up getting swapped to big-endian during memory load. Big-endian moves up in order – addresses increase upward.…