On Wednesday, August 24, 2016 11:57:08 PM CEST Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

I'm not familiar with those classifications, but from what I can tell,
BE32 describes it correctly. I'll see if I can get someone to verify
this. Is there a reason it's not widely used anymore? Perhaps
something related to supporting misaligned word-sized loads/stores?

The main problem I see is that you can't easily use MMIO registers that
are not 32-bit wide -- you end up having to flip not just the register
contents but also the lower bits of the address in order to reach
the right contents of the register.

Actually there is a much more serious problem with BE32/LE32 mode:
doing unaligned access to RAM is a huge pain at the HW level,
and also when emulating it in the kernel on CPUs that require
aligned access. In ARM THUMB2 mode, you can even have unaligned
32-bit instructions.

	Arnd