Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/919192/

Peter Hutterer writes
about the disabling of support for byte-swapped clients in the X.org server
and the reasons why this was done.

These days, encountering a Big Endian host is increasingly niche,
letting it run an X client that connects to your local
little-endian X server is even more niche. I think the only
regular real-world use-case for this is running X clients on an
s390x, connecting to your local intel-ish (and thus little endian)
workstation. Not something most users do on a regular basis. So
right now, the byte-swapping code is mainly a free attack surface
that 99% of users never actually use for anything real. So… let’s
not do that?