Endianness of Android NDK

Question

I'm working with my new app which processed captured image from cellphone camera. My phone is Nexus S, 2.3.4.

I create a ARGB_8888 Bitmap with captured data. I know the ndk image lib, but it's only support 2.2 and above. So I pass the int[] of Bitmap to NDK and found the color byte order is little-endian.

I searched the wiki and found arm architecture is bi-endian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware

My question is if arm is bi-endian, how to judge the byte order in specific device? Should I test the byte order every time before access the data?

Answer 1

Directly from my Nexus S:

> import java.nio.*; > System.out.println(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); LITTLE_ENDIAN 

There should also be some way to get the ordering in the NDK.

Answer 2

Yes most cpus bi-endian, but most end user operating systems in use today choose to use the cpus in little-endian. Along those lines, ARM can operate in both as a convenience, its actual default after ARM 3 is little-endianess which is the endian mode it starts up in. I think one can safely assume that all Android devices are little endian, otherwise it would be extra work if different android devices were a mixture of endianess.

Because network byte order is big-endian, it can be helpful to convert any format you plan on using for data interchange to network byte order. Again, though, Mac OS X on Intel, Windows, iOS and Android are little-endian, so you might just code up structures with the native endianness and hope the next great OS you want to port data to doesn't go big-endian.