From:   Jim Mostek <mostek@sgi.com>
Message-Id: <200004031947.OAA30522@fsgi344.americas.sgi.com>
Subject: Re: XFS architecture ?
To:     fredrik@air2.net (Fredrik =?iso-8859-1?Q?Win=E4s?=)
Date:   Mon, 3 Apr 2000 14:47:53 -0500 (CDT)
Cc:     linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com (Linux XFS mailinglista)
In-Reply-To: <38E8F210.A0A3D92A@air2.net> from "Fredrik =?iso-8859-1?Q?Win=E4s?=" at Apr 03, 2000 09:33:36 PM
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This has to do with the on disk format.
All IRIX XFS implementations are MIPS Big Endian.
The current pre-alpha Linux XFS implementation is IA32 Little Endian.

We have an effort underway to allow the Linux implementation to
run with different on disk formats (i.e. machine architectures):
MIPS or Native (IA32, ...) or ...

Multi means that the system can read/write multiple formats. The same machine
could have different file systems each with different formats.

This work is in development.

The first step is to give the code the ability to read multiple formats.
The second step is to see what the overhead is of always having
MIPS big endian format. I hope this is the last step. If so,
these selections will go away.

If the overhead is too much, we will need to have Native and Multi so
that we can have multiple endian on disk formats.

Jim


>Hi
>
>What is the difference between 
>
>	( ) MIPS
>	(X) Native
>	( ) Multi
>
>?
>
>
>
>Thanks