On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 07:28:15PM +0100, Kevin D. Kissell wrote:
> > If you want to run little-endian, you need to install
> > the little-endian binaries and libraries. Since I needed
> > to "swing both ways", I put both a big-endian root and
> > a little-endian root partition on my Atlas disk, with user/data
> > partitions that can be mounted on either one - fortunately,
> > the Ext2FS metadata seems to be consistent regardless
> > of endianness.
>
> Ext2fs on-disk data structures are defined to be little endian. Some very
> old ext2 filesystems which afaik where all created on Linux/M68K were big
> endian; for those e2fsck has the option to change the endianess of the
> filesystem during a fsck run; the current kernel will refuse to accept
> such big endian ext2 filesystems.
For correctness: early Linux/PPC used big-endian ext2 as well. IIRC we switched
to little-endian ext2 on m68k in late 1996, and on PPC in late 1997 / early
1998.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
