On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:40:00PM -0800, John Refling wrote:
> [...]
> Postscript
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> Ok... I've been testing this rather extensively and it works
> well, except that it appears that filesystems created on little
> endian machines cannot be used on big endian machines.  It says

It can, but you need "FFS_EI" option in your kernel config file.
Not all port may have it on by default, but at last i386 does.

> "incorrect super block".  I see that newfs can take an arg
> -B le|be to create different type of filesystems.
> 
> Is there an endian independent filesystem or one that can mount
> a different endianness filesystem than the host?

Maybe cd9660 ? With mkisofs you can create an image that you can
vndconfig and mount. It would even be trivial to create on the ftp server
after the sup update (but downloading would take more time than
just sup or cvs, I guess). The problem is that it can't be mounted
R/W, so users would have to download again to update.

But I like the idea otherwise.

> 
> This must also mean that a scsi hard disk initialized and loaded
> with data on a sparc, cannot be physically plugged in to a i386
> and successfully mounted.  Is this true?

"see above" :) I have 2 scsi MO drives, one connected to a PC at work, 
and one to my sparc at home.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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