Linux arm64 drops remaining big-endian kernel support
Will Deacon's cleanup series removes dead CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN code after the option was marked BROKEN.
The Linux arm64 port is shedding the last of its big-endian kernel support. Will Deacon has posted a third revision of a patch series that strips unused endianness handling across the architecture after CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN was made to depend on BROKEN.
Once that Kconfig option was disabled in practice, large stretches of conditional code in the BPF JIT, crypto assembly, optimised string and library routines, the 32-bit compat vDSO, KVM's nVHE hypervisor build, selftests, and assorted assembler helpers became unreachable. The series deletes those paths, drops the related CPU_LE/CPU_BE macros, and forces a little-endian kernel build unconditionally.
Driver Kconfig entries that previously required ARM64 && !CPU_BIG_ENDIAN are simplified to plain ARM64, and a Hisilicon crypto driver is adjusted so little-endian is the default assumption when the old little-endian symbol disappears.
The change does not revive or break a living configuration: big-endian arm64 kernels were already treated as non-viable. What remains is a leaner port that no longer carries dual-endian scaffolding in hot paths such as checksumming, string compares, and early boot. Acked-by tags from Catalin Marinas, Arnd Bergmann, Marc Zyngier, and others accompany the series on the linux-kernel list.