Writing Device Drivers

x86 Byte Ordering

The x86 processors use little-endian byte ordering. The least significant byte (LSB) of an integer is stored at the lowest address of the integer. The most significant byte is stored at the highest address for data items in this processor. For example, byte 7 is the most significant byte for 64-bit processors.

Diagram shows how bytes are ordered in little-endian architectures, that is, byte 0 is the least significant byte.