The idea of more big endianness in Linux wasn’t particularly welcomed by Linus Torvalds however: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-%3DwgYcOiFvsJzFb%2BHfB4n6W...

> Since Codethink has a history of bringing big-endian support to traditionally little-endian processor architectures

But why? This sounds like a company that should have been a dissertation.

They're a consultancy: ultimately they do things because either some company paid them to do it, or because they think it will help bring in future business.

There are definitely companies out there who want to run "wrong endian" configs -- traditionally this was "I have a big endian embedded networking device and I want to move away from a dying architecture (e.g. MIPS or PPC) but I really don't want to try to find all the places in my enormous legacy codebase where we accidentally or deliberately assumed big endian".

Personally I'm not in favour of having the niche usecase tail wag the general toolchain dog, and I think that's the sentiment behind Linus's remarks.

We just have to pray that the relevant standardization bodies recognise this for the terrible idea that it is and don't ratify it.

The funny thing is that their isn't even a standardized RISC-V BE ABI yet.