8.1 Diskspace requirements For the installation you'll have to choose a directory for installation. Building egcs requires 71mb and installation 14mb. GNU libc requires 149mb diskspace during compilation and 33mb for installation. Note these numbers are just a guideline and may differ significantly for different processor and operating system architectures. 8.2 Byte order One 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 byte with the highest value digits at the lowest address while little endian machines store it at the highest address. Think of it as writing multi-digit numbers from left to right or vice versa. In order to setup your crosscompiler correctly you have to know the byte order of the crosscompiler target. If you don't already know, check the section Hardware Platforms for your machine's byteorder. 8.3 Configuration names Many of the packages based on autoconf support many different architectures and operating systems.