Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel.
In response to a mailing list comment whether RISC-V big endian "BE" patches being worked on would be able to make it for this current Linux kernel cycle. Linus Torvalds initially wrote:
"Oh Christ. Is somebody seriously working on BE support in 2025?
WHY?
Seriously, that sounds like just stupid. Is there some actual real reason for this, or is it more of the "RISC-V is used in academic design classes and so people just want to do endianness for academic reasons"?
Because I'd be more than happy to just draw a line in the sand and say "New endianness problems are somebody ELSES problem", and tell people to stop being silly.
Let's not complicate things for no good reason. And there is NO reason to add new endianness.
RISC-V is enough of a mess with the millions of silly configuration issues already. Don't make it even worse.
Tell people to just talk to their therapists instead. That's much more productive."
I think it depends on the definition of "understand" in this context. In my example I used the words "does not make sense", but I did not quantify what that meant.
It could be interpreted as making sense in the context of doing things in a way that's acceptable to him.
If that doesn't "make sense" to you either, feel free to insert whatever other wording gets your point across, but I think you understand what I'm trying to say, which is that I think there is still room to be much nicer than Linus currently is, without losing the intended effect, but at the same time also not angering near as many people for (IMO) unnecessary reasons.
That is my point exactly. Thank you for illustrating my point.
If you can be nice while also being direct, please do. We agree on being nice. We disagree on the value of speaking less plainly. When these two goals collide, speaking plainly has to prevail.