Documentation/devicetree/bindings/common-properties.txt

Common properties

The ePAPR specification does not define any properties related to hardware
byteswapping, but endianness issues show up frequently in porting Linux to
different machine types.  This document attempts to provide a consistent
way of handling byteswapping across drivers.

Optional properties:
 - big-endian: Boolean; force big endian register accesses
   unconditionally (e.g. ioread32be/iowrite32be).  Use this if you
   know the peripheral always needs to be accessed in BE mode.
 - little-endian: Boolean; force little endian register accesses
   unconditionally (e.g. readl/writel).  Use this if you know the
   peripheral always needs to be accessed in LE mode.
 - native-endian: Boolean; always use register accesses matched to the
   endianness of the kernel binary (e.g. LE vmlinux -> readl/writel,
   BE vmlinux -> ioread32be/iowrite32be).  In this case no byteswaps
   will ever be performed.  Use this if the hardware "self-adjusts"
   register endianness based on the CPU's configured endianness.

If a binding supports these properties, then the binding should also
specify the default behavior if none of these properties are present.
In such cases, little-endian is the preferred default, but it is not
a requirement.  The of_device_is_big_endian() and of_fdt_is_big_endian()
helper functions do assume that little-endian is the default, because
most existing (PCI-based) drivers implicitly default to LE by using
readl/writel for MMIO accesses.

Examples:
Scenario 1 : CPU in LE mode & device in LE mode.
dev: dev@40031000 {
	      compatible = "name";
	      reg = <0x40031000 0x1000>;
	      ...
	      native-endian;
};

Scenario 2 : CPU in LE mode & device in BE mode.
dev: dev@40031000 {
	      compatible = "name";
	      reg = <0x40031000 0x1000>;
	      ...
	      big-endian;
};

Scenario 3 : CPU in BE mode & device in BE mode.
dev: dev@40031000 {
	      compatible = "name";
	      reg = <0x40031000 0x1000>;
	      ...
	      native-endian;
};

Scenario 4 : CPU in BE mode & device in LE mode.
dev: dev@40031000 {
	      compatible = "name";
	      reg = <0x40031000 0x1000>;
	      ...
	      little-endian;
};