Subject: Re: as long as we're hitting FFS...
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
From: Ignatios Souvatzis <is@jocelyn.rhein.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/24/1999 22:19:01
On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 01:25:11PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Mar 23, Perry E. Metzger wrote
> > 3) Eliminate endianness of FFSes -- this is more controversial. Right
> > now, we have bi-endian support, but it would be cool not to need it.
> 
> I'm not sure this one is a that good idea. It may have performances
> issues. Did someone actually check this on a slow (m68k, vax, ...) machine ?
> And which byte order will we use ?

network byte order, of course, to help the NFS server ;-)
and, inline ntohl() is 0 cycles  on m68k ;-)

in case little endiannes was used: m68k swapl is 3 instructions,
60ns on 68060/50, 20 cycles/1 us on 20MHz 68020.

Depending on how much of that you need, affordable.
Ask the VAX people about slow machines.

	-is