On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 9:47 AM Conor Dooley <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 09:30:00AM +1000, Alistair Francis wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 9:39 PM Mohamed Mediouni
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > On 25. Feb 2026, at 11:20, Djordje Todorovic 
> > > > <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > This series adds big-endian (BE) RISC-V target support to QEMU,
> > > > covering both softmmu and linux-user emulation for riscv32be and
> > > > riscv64be.
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > There’s no Linux RISC-V big endian. Maybe the right thing to do is to not
> > > support it unless we’re sure that it can get to Linux upstream (for the 
> > > linux-user mode)?
> >
> > Agreed. We really need upstream Linux support before user mode
>
> On that front, Ben posted patches for it and Linus was really really not
> enthused when he became aware of it:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-riscv/[email protected]
> Even without Linus' take, I feel like there's absolutely no chance of
> upstream support without meaningful shipping hardware that requires
> big endian support, because basically everyone else was also opposed to
> adding it...

Yeah... I saw that.

A few thoughts, just because Linus doesn't like it doesn't mean QEMU
can't support it. But I am hesitant to support BE considering the lack
of ecosystem support everywhere else.

There are a bunch of changes in this series that could easily go into
QEMU. They aren't intrusive and just involve changing or using helper
functions to handle endianness. I think those could be split out and
go upstream, reducing the size of this series and reducing the
maintenance burden of out of tree patches.

The core BE support is a different problem. But if softmmu works in
the existing binaries then maybe it's worth accepting. linux user mode
is a whole other problem that we probably won't be able to accept.

Alistair

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