this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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RISC-V

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RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is a license-free, modular, extensible instruction set architecture (ISA).

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Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel.

In response to a mailing list comment whether RISC-V big endian "BE" patches being worked on would be able to make it for this current Linux kernel cycle. Linus Torvalds initially wrote:

"Oh Christ. Is somebody seriously working on BE support in 2025?

WHY?

Seriously, that sounds like just stupid. Is there some actual real reason for this, or is it more of the "RISC-V is used in academic design classes and so people just want to do endianness for academic reasons"?

Because I'd be more than happy to just draw a line in the sand and say "New endianness problems are somebody ELSES problem", and tell people to stop being silly.

Let's not complicate things for no good reason. And there is NO reason to add new endianness.

RISC-V is enough of a mess with the millions of silly configuration issues already. Don't make it even worse.

Tell people to just talk to their therapists instead. That's much more productive."

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[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 3 points 8 hours ago

Torvalds has never been known for not speaking his mind,. But in this instance I'm not sure I would disagree with him. This isn't the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s at this point. Things largely have settled on little endian.

I'm going to assume that if people are still trying to push big endian. There must be some point to it or some advantage. Though I have no idea what it would be.

[–] Dadifer@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

Um, stop holding back, Linus.