Re: [ANN] Squashfs 3.0 released

From: Phillip Lougher
Date: Fri Mar 17 2006 - 12:02:02 EST


On 17 Mar 2006, at 16:00, Jeff Garzik wrote:

Jörn Engel wrote:
On Fri, 17 March 2006 11:16:48 +0000, Phillip Lougher wrote:
The one still painfully missing is a
fixed-endianness disk format.

We had that argument last year.
Yes, I remember. What I don't remember is your opinion on the matter.
Did we reach some sort of conclusion?

Fixed endian isn't necessarily a requirement. Detectable endian is. As long as (a) the filesystem mkfs notes the endian-ness and (b) the kernel filesystem code properly handles both types of endian, life is fine.

That's what is currently done. There are two filesystem formats, big endian (donated by Squashfs magic of 'sqsh') and little endian (denoted by Squashfs magic of 'hsqs'). The kernel code detects the filesystem endianness and swaps if necessary.

For SquashFS, though, I would think that fixed endian would be easy. Since it is byte-packed, just handle endian as you unpack.

That's what is currently done. The data is swapped if necessary at unpack time. Afterwards no further swapping is performed.

Phillip
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