der Mouse (mouse@Collatz.McRCIM.McGill.EDU) wrote:
: > Hidden in this reply is an interesting snippet I think should go into
: > a (7) cdrom man page, if its true you can't read big-endian byte
: > order FFS CD's on little-endian CPUs and vice-versa.
: 
: AFAIK you can't, any more than you can read a big-endian FFS on a
: little-endian machine when the FFS is on something else.
: 
: > gee.. could we have a small fs layer that byteswapped so we can
: > cross-mount between different architectures?
: 
: Heh.  Yeah, that'd be a good thing to have.  Are you volunteering to
: write it? :-)
: 
: > sure would make bootstrapping some of the dead iron simpler if you
: > could put an old Ultrix SCSI drive onto a PC and read/write the damn
: > thing.
: 
: Aren't "old Ultrix" little-endian, just like the 80x86?

VAXen, are little endian by hardware design. DECstations are little
endian by design, although the MIPS cpu can be operated either way (I
don't know whether it is hard wired to LE or software controlled to do
it). I guess the same is true for Alphas... Chris?

	Ignatios Souvatzis