Why run ixp4xx LE? (Was: [PATCH] Intel IXP4xx network drivers v.2 - Ethernet and HSS)

Michael-Luke Jones wrote:

On 8 May 2007, at 09:48, Alexey Zaytsev wrote:

quoted

I was always curious, why do people want to run ixp4xx in LE mode? What
are the benefits that overweight the obvious performance degradation?

Debian.
http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

And also out-of-kernel drivers for things like webcams, which have been
naively written for x86 little endian and have no concept of endian
neutrality.  In some cases it's just easier to run LE instead of
fighting with the driver code.

BTW, for the consumer-level IXP42x devices (like the NSLU2) the
performance difference is *completely* overwhelmed by slowness in the
rest of the system.

-- Rod