Andrew Sharp wrote: > > Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > > > > On Wed, 30 May 2001, Andrew Sharp wrote: > > > The big endian patches change the code to use little endian ordering > > > for all on-disk structures. IMO this is a mistake, and certainly > > > costs a dear performance penalty, because on big endian processors, > > > this method requires converting endianness both ways (reading and > > > writing) for all meta data. I submit that there is little reason > > > for this, and the performance cost is not worth the very dubious > > > feature of having the file system be moveable to little endian > > > systems, like x86. Note that except in few cases, the disk labels > > > > We had the same discussion many years ago about ext2fs, and a few years > > later about XFS. In fact m68k and ppc used to have a big-endian ext2fs. > > > > Now ext2fs is defined to store metadata in little-endian order, and XFS to > > store metadata in big-endian order. This was done for interoperability > > reasons. > > > > Since people do want to exchange disks between machines, the alternative > > was to support both endiannesses. In fact m68k did have a bi-endian ext2fs > > for a > > I would actually like to hear more about these discussions. Are > there any archives? Are they too old? Geez, if some silly person > wants to take a disk from one machine to another, well, that is what > vfat is for, no? ~:^)
You are way off. If the endianness of reiserfs wasn't defined, I couldn't be running it now. Because I can only connect one disk to this PowerBook, so I had to partition the new one in my Athlon box (parted rules :), mkreiserfs there and then move my filesystem over with tar via ssh (and MacOS with cat via ssh ;). -- Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper) \ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer CS student, Free Software enthusiast \ XFree86 and DRI project member
