I had once thought that e6500 would be set to big or little endian mode. Perhaps on a core by core basis, or perhaps everything the same. The e6500rm manual talks about memory pages being big or little endian, not the core.
So, with that view, is it possible to restrict altivec instructions and data to be in big endian pages, and kind of run the endian mode based on where you are in memory, in a hybrid-endian sort of way??
the ref manual says you would get sn error condition if you are doing a memory read and cross a page boundary into a different-endian page... #e6500 #t2080 #altivec #little endian