[Dump-users] Re: Dump deprecation FAQ

[Stelian P. <st...@po...>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 08:55:21PM +0100, Dragan Krnic wrote:

> 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 don't recall having said that.

> I find it a bit awkward and it breaks the compatibility
> between platforms of different endianness.
> 
> Is there a way to bridge the gap?

In fact dump writes the data in the platform endianness and
there is code in restore which tries to detect if the
machine on which the restore is done has a different endianess,
and if this is the case, it does the conversions.

This applies to the dump own metadata (the dump header etc).
Wrt to the filesystem data, ext2/ext3 metadata is in little endian
no matter what the host endianess is, so there is nothing to be done.
This is often the case for filesystems because they are designed
to be read on any machine, big endian or little endian.

Stelian.
-- 
Stelian Pop <st...@po...>