Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: switching file systems
Message-ID: <1989Oct8.023848.12588@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <24987@louie.udel.EDU> <2453@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <1989Oct5.181148.8229@utzoo.uucp> <3544@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 89 02:38:48 GMT

In article <3544@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>... What I intend to do is to have an in-core inode
>structure that is reasonably decoupled from the bits on the disk...
>The real reason for decoupling, however, is to make the IBM and Atari
>disks exactly the same (little endian)...

This sounds like an excellent idea.  The transition from pdp11s to
VAXen was made unnecessarily difficult by byte-order problems with the
file systems, which could have been avoided quite easily by such a
method.  (In fact, I recall a talk about "8.2BSD", which was 2.8BSD that
some group had hacked to use VAX byte order in its filesystems, so they
could swap disks around easily.)

>... I think that only 6 routines would be needed...

Sounds plausible to me.  I second the suggestion that these routines be
made available (in a library?) to fsck and friends too.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu