During compilation you'll need about 31mb diskspace for binutils. Building egcs requires 71mb and installation 14mb. GNU libc requires 149mb diskspace during installation and 33mb for installation. Note these number are just a guideline and may differ significantly for different processor and operating system architectures. On of the special features of the MIPS architecture is that all processors except the R8000 can be configured to run either in big or in little endian mode.
Byte order means the way the processor stores multibyte numbers in memory.
Big endian machines store the the byte with the highest value digits at the lowest address while little endian machines store it at the highest address. Think of it like writing multi digit numbers from the left to the right or visa versa. In order to setup your crosscompiler correctly you have to know the byte order of the crosscompiler target. Configuration names Many of the packages based on autoconf are supporting many different architectures and operating systems. You must use the same configuration name for all the packages that your crosscompilation environment consists of.