[Dump-users] Re: Dump deprecation FAQ

[Dragan K. <dk...@ly...>]

Hi Stellian,

in a previous posting you mentioned that dump uses the
host endianness, meaning mostly it is small-endian,
because there are few big-endian processors today.
I find it a bit awkward and it breaks the compatibility
between platforms of different endianness.

Is there a way to bridge the gap?

I tried reading Linux dump on an HP system. It didn't work.
I tried HP dump and vxdump on a Linux. It didn't work either.

Of course, your dump/restore sources can at least be built on 
the target platform, but I guess one would still have to fix 
a lot of binary reads to reverse the endianness on a big-endian
system.

Was it ever a problem? Is there a provision for dealing
with endianness in dump?

Cheers
Dragan

PS: It's not an accademic issue that bothers me. I'm about 
to release a reiserfsdump/restore and I used ntohX family
of routines to keep the big-endianness even though I did
it on an Intel Linux. It was much easier to debug when
bytes are ordered most-significant-first.(left to right).
Now I would like to make it compatible with your dump and
am scratching my head how to do it. Any idea?