Hi all,
> 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.
Thanks for the info; that's really interesting news. I guess this will not
only help the Sparc and m68k people, but also people that intend like Larry
to port Linux/MIPS to big endian machines.
How about setting up a new mailing list exclusivly dedicated to the purpose
of porting Linux to other architectures? I think in general there is often
a bit a lack of comunication between the Linux peoples about such issues.
Recently the were a few email discussions about portability topics.
Unfortunately not all the people that should had interest in the discussion
were involved and I think a mailing list would be a way to solve the
problem. I think we could setup such a list with *fast* answer times on
either fnet.fr (Stoned, Luc?) or on phil.uni-sb.de.
Ralf
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