Writing journal only in Big Endian format

[Dave Chinner]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:47:41AM +0530, Nitin Arora wrote:
> The problem is that big endian machine cannot recognize the
> journal which was written in little endian format by the little
> endian machine and once the journal is zerod out it can be
> mouted.
> 
> Now the solution to above problem seems writing journal always in
> big endian format.

Or you could just replay the log on the little endian machine and do
a clean unmount, then you should be able to move it to the big
endian machine without losing anything.

> Please suggest me, Is there any design limitation in XFS for this.

No design limitation, just a *lot* of work to change. If you don't
have a few months handy to work on this, I'd just use the above
method....

> Is it okay and feasible to implement it if yes then please give
> some pointers so that it can be implemented,

All log headers, tails and sector fills need to be converted, every log
item format routine needs a big-endian version, log recovery needs
to be able to read both host-format and big-endian logs, all the
userspace tools need to learn about different log formats, QA tests
need to be written, etc.

> under some suitable
> compile time switch.

It could be done with a superblock feature bit, so the same kernel
could support both big-endian logs and host format.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com