X servers no longer allow byte-swapped clients [LWN.net]
[Posted January 6, 2023 by corbet] 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?
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