Endianness White Paper

Overview

Endianness is the format to how multi-byte data is stored in computer memory. It describes the location of the most significant byte (MSB) and least significant byte (LSB) of an address in memory. Endianness is dictated by the CPU architecture implementation of the system. The operating system does not dictate the endian model implemented, but rather the endian model of the CPU architecture dictates how the operating system is implemented. This paper describes software considerations related to microprocessor Endian architecture and discusses guidelines for developing Endian-neutral code.