Brett Lymn writes:
>Why not just noffs (network order ffs)?  That way you would not need
>to worry about be/le, you just mount it...

Because it's a subset of what was proposed.

ffsnb == ffsbe, by definition, and so adding ffsbe to a big-endian
machine is a no-op. If you have a native byteorder filesystem
on a LE machine, and the LE machine loses its magic smoke and dies,
having an "ffsbe" on a handy big-endian doesn't help you at all.
You need an ffsle to read the little-endian FFS from the dead machine.

ObHistory: NeXTStep/486 ran with a big-endian FFS on little-endian
machines precisely to support physically moving filesystems between
x86 and m680[34]0 machines.  Inlining the byteswap instruction in the
filesystem code was _the_ reason that NextSTEP/486 didn't run on 386es.

--J