From: zaitcev@ithil.mcst.ru
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 09:36:52 +0300
> Linux doesn't yet handle big endian machines very good. Especially
> the filesystem made serious trouble. The worst thing is that you cannot
> easily build filesystem images on your PC to boot your Linux machine.
This is not the case for a two or three days already. The hottest news is
that gcc compiles object code on SPARC with i386-compatible ext2 filesystem.
But I have not done this myself yet and rely on i386 with a cross-compiler.
Peter is correct, I wrote the necessary byte swapping / bit-swapping
code for the ext2 filesystem sources in the kernel. The code
basically turns into nops on little endian machines, but does the
correct thing on big endian architectures.
A copy of my tools which create little endian ext2 filesystems on big
endian sparc machines can be gotten from:
vger.rutgers.edu:/pub/linux/Sparc/ext2fs/e2fsprogs.tar.gz
I have built two kernels under sparclinux on these filesystems, so
things seem ok.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu
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