-On Wed, 30 May 2001, 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.
You should also mention the reason why there wasn't any major resistance
from these elitist m68k hackers. As I recall it, the overhead of swapping
filesystem metadata at runtime was too small to be noticeable, even on
m68k.
But it's been a while, and I haven't kept mail archives from that time.
Michael
