Hi, Arnd,

On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 2:25 PM Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

Following the deprecation of big-endian ARMv8 mode in arch/arm64 in commit
1cf89b6bf660 ("arm64: Kconfig: Make CPU_BIG_ENDIAN depend on BROKEN"),
this does the same for ARMv7 (and v6), leaving the code around but
disabled by default: There are no known products that make use of this
mode any more, and it only hangs around for testing that it still works.

Nice! Getting rid of ARM big-endian support is long overdue in my
opinion. The patch looks good to me, although see below for a couple
minor questions.

At the moment, there are no known bugs with big-endian ARMv7 mode, but
it does break occasionally and require someone to fix it.  By marking
the code as 'depends on BROKEN' now, it will no longer be covered by CI
testing. If any users remain, they can keep patching out the dependency
but are more likely to run into regressions.

The big-endian ARMv5 support (CONFIG_CPU_ENDIAN_BE32) in contrast is
still used on Intel IXP4xx platform, and is the only currently supported
mode there, so this one can still be enabled.

If IXP4xx is the only known remaining user, would it make sense for
CPU_BIG_ENDIAN to instead depend on ARCH_IXP4XX || BROKEN? Is BE32
mode known to work correctly on any other platforms?

Ethan