Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@UX2.SP.CS.CMU.EDU> writes:

> 
> Certainly, if you put them into big-endian mode, you may have to code
> more in the drivers...  Also, for PCI in particular, you run into
> interesting cases when the devices are behind bridges...

You seem to be making the awfully large leap of faith that nobody will
ever procude a PCI device which `wants' to speak big-endian natively.
I don't buy that, especially with PowerPC boxes starting to use PCI.

A global interface which makes assumptions about byte order would be
broken.