Endianness

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In computing, endianness is the byte (and sometimes bit) ordering used to represent
some kind of data. Typical cases are the order in which integer values are stored as
bytes in computer memory (relative to a given memory addressing scheme) and the
transmission order over a network or other medium. When specifically talking about
bytes, endianness is also referred to simply as byte order. [1]

Generally speaking, endianness is a particular attribute of a representation format -

which byte of a UCS-2 character would be stored at the lower address, etc. Byte order is
an important consideration in network programming, since two computers with different
byte orders may be communicating. Failure to account for varying endianness when
writing code for mixed platforms can lead to some very ugly bugs.

Contents
[hide]
 1 Clarifying analogy
 2 Endianness and hardware
o 2.1 Bi-endian hardware
o 2.2 Floating-point and endianness
 3 Discussion, background, etymology
 4 Method of mapping registers to memory locations
 5 Examples of storing the value 0x0A0B0C0D in memory
o 5.1 Big-endian
o 5.2 Little-endian
o 5.3 Middle-endian
 6 Endianness in networking
 7 "Bit endianness"
 8 Other meanings
 9 Notes

 10 External links

[edit] Clarifying analogy

Endianness is the system used to arrange things by order of magnitude. To illustrate
this, by analogy, numbers are written in a big-endian order, with the highest order
numbers coming first. For example, the number 834 signifies 8 hundreds (102), 3 tens
(101) and 4 'single numbers' (100). Dates ordered that way would be written yyyy-mm-
dd. The dd-mm-yyyy system would then be little endian and mm-dd-yyyy middle
endian because the middle order of magnitude is written first (however, the numbers
representing days, months, and years are all still big-endian in themselves).
[edit] Endianness and hardware
Most modern computer processors agree on bit ordering "inside" individual bytes (this
was not always the case). This means that any single-byte value will be read the same
on almost any computer one may send it to.

Integers are usually stored as sequences of bytes, so that the encoded value can be
obtained by simple concatenation. The two most common of them are:

 increasing numeric significance with increasing memory addresses, known as

little-endian, and
 its opposite, most-significant byte first, called big-endian.[2]

"Big-endian" does not mean "ending big", but "big end first".

Well known processor architectures that use the little-endian format include 6502, Z80,
x86, and, largely, PDP-11. Motorola processors such as the 6800 and 68000 have
generally used big-endian. PowerPC (which includes Apple's Macintosh line prior to the
Intel switch) and System/370 also adopt big-endian. SPARC historically used big-
endian, though version 9 is bi-endian (see below).

[edit] Bi-endian hardware

Some architectures (including ARM, PowerPC (but not the PPC970/G5), DEC Alpha,
SPARC V9, MIPS, PA-RISC and IA64) feature switchable endianness. This feature can
improve performance or simplify the logic of networking devices and software. The
word bi-endian, said of hardware, denotes the capability to compute or pass data in
either of two different endian formats.

Many of these architectures can be switched via software to default to a specific endian
format (usually done when the computer starts up); however, on some systems the
default endianness is selected by hardware on the motherboard and cannot be changed
via software (e.g., the DEC Alpha, which runs only in big-endian mode on the Cray
T3E).

Note that "bi-endian" refers primarily to how a processor treats data accesses.
Instruction accesses (fetches of instruction words) on a given processor may still
assume a fixed endianness, even if data accesses are fully bi-endian.

Note, too, that some nominally bi-endian CPUs may actually employ internal "magic"
(as opposed to really switching to a different endianness) in one of their operating
modes. For instance, some PowerPC processors in little-endian mode act as little-endian
from the point of view of the executing programs but they do not actually store data in
memory in little-endian format (multi-byte values are swapped during memory
load/store operations). This can cause problems when memory is transferred to an
external device if some part of the software, e.g. a device driver, does not account for
the situation.

[edit] Floating-point and endianness

On some machines, while integers were represented in little-endian form, floating-point
numbers were represented in big-endian form. [3] Because there are many floating
formats, and a lack of a standard "network" representation, no standard for transferring
floating point values has been made. This means that floating point data written on one
machine may not be readable on another, and this is the case even if both use IEEE 754
floating point arithmetic since the endian-ness of the memory representation is not part
of the IEEE specification. [4]

[edit] Discussion, background, etymology

The choice of big-endian vs. little-endian has been the subject of flame wars. The very
term big-endian comes from Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels, where
tensions are described in Lilliput and Blefuscu: whereas royal edict in Lilliput requires
cracking open one's soft-boiled egg at the small end, inhabitants of the rival kingdom of
Blefuscu crack theirs at the big end (giving them the moniker Big-endians).[3] The terms
little-endian and endianness have a similar intent.[4]

An often cited argument in favor of big-endian is that it is consistent with the ordering
commonly used in natural languages;[5] that is, however, far from being universal, both
in spoken and written form: spoken languages have a wide variety of organizations of
numbers, and although numbers are nowadays written almost universally in the Hindu-
Arabic numeral system, with the most significant digits written to the left, whether this
is "big-endian" or "little-endian" depends on the direction of text flow in the writing
system being used.

The little-endian system has the property that, in the absence of alignment restrictions,
values can be read from memory at different widths without using different addresses.
For example, a 32-bit memory location with content 4A 00 00 00 can be read at the
same address as either 8-bit (value = 4A), 16-bit (004A), or 32-bit (0000004A). (This
example works only if the value makes sense in all three sizes, which means the value
fits in just 8 bits.) This little-endian property is rarely used, and does not imply that
little-endian has any performance advantage in variable-width data access. (In real-
world analogy, though, if one had 1004 widgets, this could be said to be like knowing
that one has “something-ending-in-4” widgets before knowing that one has one
thousand of them.)

Conversely, in big-endian systems, the first byte is simply the coarsest part of the value,
and subsequent bytes increase in precision. (In real-world analogy, if one had 1004
widgets, this is like finding that one has one thousand widgets before finding that the
exact number is 1004.)

[edit] Method of mapping registers to memory

locations

Mapping registers to memory locations

Using this chart, one can map an access (or, for a concrete example: "write 32 bits to
address 0") from register to memory or from memory to register. To help in
understanding that access, little and big endianness can be seen in the diagram as
differing in their coordinate system's orientation. Big endianness's atomic units and
memory coordinate system increases in the diagram from left to right, while little
endianness's units increase from right to left.

[edit] Examples of storing the value 0x0A0B0C0D in memory

Note: the prefix 0x indicates hexadecimal notation.

To further illustrate the above notions this section provides example layouts of a 32-bit
number in the most common variants of endianness. There is no general guarantee that a
platform will use one of these formats but in practice there are few if any exceptions.

All the examples refer to the storage in memory of the value 0x0A0B0C0D.

[edit] Big-endian

 With 8-bit atomic element size and 1-byte (octet) address increment:

increasing addresses  →

... 0x0A 0x0B 0x0C 0x0D ...

The most significant byte (MSB) value, which is 0x0A in our example, is stored at the
memory location with the lowest address, the next byte value in significance, 0x0B, is
stored at the following memory location and so on. This is akin to Left-to-Right reading
order in hexadecimal.

 With 16-bit atomic element size:

increasing addresses  →

... 0x0A0B 0x0C0D ...

The most significant atomic element stores now the value 0x0A0B, followed by 0x0C0D.

[edit] Little-endian

 With 8-bit atomic element size and 1-byte (octet) address increment:

increasing addresses  →
 ... 0x0D 0x0C 0x0B 0x0A ...

The least significant byte (LSB) value, 0x0D, is at the lowest address. The other bytes
follow in increasing order of significance.

 With 16-bit atomic element size:

increasing addresses  →

... 0x0C0D 0x0A0B ...

The least significant 16-bit unit stores the value 0x0C0D, immediately followed by
0x0A0B.

 With byte addresses increasing from right to left:

The 16-bit atomic element byte ordering may look backwards as written above, but this
is because little-endian is best written with addressing increasing towards the left. If we
write the bytes this way then the ordering makes slightly more sense:

←  increasing addresses

... 0x0A 0x0B 0x0C 0x0D ...

The least significant byte (LSB) value, 0x0D, is at the lowest address. The other bytes
follow in increasing order of significance.

←  increasing addresses

... 0x0A0B 0x0C0D ...

The least significant 16-bit unit stores the value 0x0C0D, immediately followed by
0x0A0B.

However, if one displays memory with addresses increasing to the left like this, then the
display of Unicode (or ASCII) text is reversed from the normal display (for left-to-right
languages). For example, the word "XRAY" displayed in the "little-endian-friendly"
manner just described is:

←  increasing addresses

... "Y" "A" "R" "X" ...

This conflict between the memory arrangements of binary data and text is intrinsic to
the nature of the little-endian convention, but is a conflict only for languages written
left-to-right (such as the western European languages like English). For right-to-left
languages such as Arabic, there is no conflict of text with binary, and the preferred
display in both cases would be with addresses increasing to the left. (On the other hand,
right-to-left languages have a complementary intrinsic conflict in the big-endian
system.)

[edit] Middle-endian

Still other architectures, generically called middle-endian or mixed-endian, may have a

more complicated ordering; PDP-11, for instance, stored some 32-bit words, counting
from the most significant, as: 2nd byte first, then 1st, then 4th, and finally 3rd.

 storage of a 32-bit word on a PDP-11

increasing addresses  →

... 0x0B 0x0A 0x0D 0x0C ...

Note that this can be interpreted as storing the most significant "half" (16-bits) followed
by the less significant half (as if big-endian) but with each half stored in little-endian
format. This ordering is known as PDP-endianness.

The ARM architecture can also produce this format when writing a 32-bit word to an
address 2 bytes from a 32-bit word alignment.

[edit] Endianness in networking

Networks generally use big-endian order, and thus it is called network order when
sending information over a network in a common format. The historical reason is that
this allowed routing while a telephone number was being composed. In fact, the Internet
Protocol defines a standard big-endian network byte order. This byte order is used for
all numeric values in the packet headers and by many higher level protocols and file
formats that are designed for use over IP. The Berkeley sockets API defines a set of
functions to convert 16- and 32-bit integers to and from network byte order: the htonl
(host-to-network-long) and htons (host-to-network-short) functions convert 32-bit and
16-bit values respectively from machine (host) to network order; whereas the ntohl and
ntohs functions convert from network to host order.

While the lowest network protocols may deal with sub-byte formatting, all the layers
above them usually consider the byte (mostly meant as octet) as their atomic unit.

[edit] "Bit endianness"

The terms bit endianness or bit-level endianness are seldom used when talking about the
representation of a stored value, as they are only meaningful for the rare computer
architectures which support addressing of individual bits. They are used however to
refer to the transmission order of bits over a serial medium. Most often that order is
transparently managed by the hardware and is the bit-level analogue of little-endian
(low-bit first), although protocols exist which require the opposite ordering (e.g. I²C). In
networking, the decision about the order of transmission of bits is made in the very
bottom of the data link layer of the OSI model.

[edit] Other meanings

Some authors extend the usage of the word "endianness", and of related terms, to
entities such as street addresses, date formats and others. It should be noticed however
that such usages—basically reducing endianness to a mere synonym of ordering of the
parts—are non-standard usage (e.g., ISO 8601:2004 talks about "descending order year-
month-day", not about "big-endian format"), do not have widespread usage, and are
generally (other than for date formats) employed in a metaphorical sense.

"Endianness" is sometimes used to describe the order of the components of an internet

site address, e.g. 'en.wikipedia.org' (the usual modern 'little-endian' form) versus the
reverse-DNS 'org.wikipedia.en' ('big-endian', often used in the past and still used for
Java packages).

[edit] Notes
1. ^ For hardware, the Jargon File also reports the less common expression byte sex [1]. It
is unclear whether this terminology is also used when more than two orderings are
possible. Similarly, the manual for the ORCA/M assembler refers to a field indicating
the order of the bytes in a number field as NUMSEX, and the Mac OS X operating system
refers to "byte sex" in its compiler tools [2].
2. ^ Note that, in these expressions, the term "end" is meant as "extremity", not as "last
part"; and that big and little say which extremity is written first.
3. ^ Gulliver's Travels (Part I, Chapter IV) on Wikisource
4. ^ Endian FAQ – includes the paper Internet Engineering Note (IEN) 137: On Holy
Wars and a Plea for Peace ftp mirror by Danny Cohen (1 April 1980), but adds much
more context.
5. ^ Cf. entries 539 and 704 of the Linguistic Universals Database

[edit] External links

 White Paper: Endianness or Where is Byte 0?
 Byte Ordering PPC
 The Layout of Data in Memory
 Writing endian-independent code in C
 How to convert an integer to little endian or big endian
 Understanding big and little endian byte order

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of
Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness"

Categories: Computer memory | Data transmission