Let me strongly disagree with:
>If we end up with (b) this is a
>relatively small additional development effort.
The biggest part would come in all the support/testing/... on the
different architecture combinations. If the on-disk format and log format
are all fixed, it greatly simplifies things.
Longer term, with CXFS servers moving between architectures ...
IMHO,
Jim
>
>On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Stefan Smietanowski wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> Linux had that before, with Big Endian machines having a Big Endian
>> ext2, but that was dropped before 2.0.0 if I recall correctly, and now
>> all linux machines use a little endian ext2 system. I can't remember the
>> extra overhead needed to switch endianness though ...
>>
>> If it comes to using different formats based on the native endianness,
>> will the IRIX XFS be extended also to support this feature?
>>
>> If it doesn't, that would mean that I cannot take my linux XFS partition
>> and move it to the IRIX machine, which imho is one point with running a
>> native XFS system on Linux.
>
>Rest assured. Our IRIX heritage and the very migration strategy you
>describe mandate that XFS on Linux _will_ support the IRIX MIPS on-disk
>format.
>
>The issue we still have to resolve (and this is the initial objective of the
>endian work) is,
>
>(a) will the XFS on-disk format be the IRIX MIPS format everywhere
> (the every XFS is big endian model), or
>(b) will the Linux version of XFS support both a little endian on-disk
> format (what you see today with the released code on Intel
> platforms), _and_ the IRIX MIPS on-disk format
>
>Note that most of the source code changes and effort go into moving
>from the status today to (a). If we end up with (b) this is a
>relatively small additional development effort.
>
>The way this work is being done, there may also be another option
>
>(c) make the on-disk format the same as the in memory format ... this
> is the "convert nothing" model for those who care about nanocycles
> and don't care about media interoperability or clustered
> filesystems
>
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