Initial filesystem design synopsis.

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Mon Feb 26 08:38:04 PST 2007


:Hi, I was wondering if you'd considered making HAMMER endian neutral. I
:think that would be a very good thing.
:~Robert

     The answer is both yes and no.  It is clearly important to make the
     filesystem endian-neutral, which is accomplished by placing an endian
     control field in the segment header.  When the segment is created,
     the endianness would be set to the originating machine's endianness
     (the idea being that all operations would then use native endianness
     and any other accessors with incompatible endianess would be able to
     detect which endianess to use and translate accordingly).

     That is the yes part.  The no part is that I am not going to actually
     put in code to translate endianess, at least not initially.  Eventually,
     yes (and that could wind up being a little side project)... I think it's
     important.  But it also creates a mess so it won't be in the initial
     work.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>





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