On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On 23 Mar 1999, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > 3) Eliminate endianness of FFSes -- this is more controversial. Right
> > now, we have bi-endian support, but it would be cool not to need it.
> 
> Wouldn't result this in a serious performance loss?
> (At least that's what I've been told...)

I don't know how serious a loss it would be, but it'd be a (In my opinion)
needless performance loss. Why make half of our architectures always swap
when we don't have to? FS's, as opposed to network protocols, don't move
from machine to machine much. Sure, crashed disks, and floppies, do. But
most of the time an FS will stay on the machine on which it was made
(won't it?). So why optimize for the multi-machine case (fixed, universal
endianness) when fs movement is rare?

Also, don't boot monitors require an ffs of the host's endianness? Or is
that totally bootblocks-specific? For machines where the "chosen"
endianness is different from the vendor os, we would make it hard to
switch OS's.

Take care,

Bill