OpenSSL: Remove support for big-endian i386 and amd64.
openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libssl/src...Posted Apr 19, 2014, 12:13 AM UTC
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openbsd.org
( While x86 hasn't ever been one of them to the best of my knowledge, there are hardware-level bi-endian architectures including pretty mainstream ones like PPC )
Stratus apparently wanted to keep numbers in the same endianness on all the architectures they supported. I don't think it's as wtfworthy as some of the stuff. Not all that different to java/jvm always being big-endian.
Numeric values in VOS are always big endian, regardless of the endianness of the underlying hardware platform. On little endian servers with x86 processors, the compilers do a byte swap before reading or writing values to memory to transform the data to or from the native little endian format.
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And this justifies complicating the OpenSSL codebase how?
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the point is its really more like "drop support for stratus vos" like "drop support for vms", not "haha big-endian x86". Still reasonable to drop - I don't think an effort to fork and unfuck openssl for openbsd use is gonna support anything other than openbsd of course (though openbsd stuff generally ports easy to gnu+linux).
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It'll almost certainly still have Linux support (and general Unix support); OpenBSD's subprojects rarely limit themselves to OpenBSD (see also: OpenSSH).
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OpenSSH needs a team to port it out of openBSD, they don't care a dime for use outside of the project. It is possible because they are *nix, but they don't try to do it specially easy. Here: There’s nothing official announced about a fork to other OSes. Typically OpenBSD projects are written for OpenBSD first and foremost, and then ported if there’s interest.
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Bear in mind openssh is actually openbsd openssh with a somewhat distinct portable-openssh effort layered on though. Not an insider, but I'd expect a similar structure here. There'll presumably be some interest in a similar arrangement for bsdtls or whatever they decide to call it, and then a portable-bsdtls, but it's not a given.
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So, a few hundred lines of virtually uncommented code and there are bugs in it? No shit! I would have been fired for submitting something like this.
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Nooooooo !! will this effect my powerpc server?
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Your PowerPC doesn't rely on the big-endian i386 / amd64 architectures. Nor does any machine in the world. Supporting big-endian i386 was stupid. Supporting big-endian amd64 was simply idiotic.
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*sighs with relief
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So what does this mean?
Not too much. No one uses big-endian x86.
That's what I thought, so why keep support for it around?