George Michaelson <ggm@connect.com.au> writes:
>  As I remember NeXT-CDs just have a FFS file system on them.
>  In theory you should be able to read them on big-endian NetBSD
>  machines.
>
>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.

<a snippet of history>
when PJ Plauger left Bell Labs and founded Whitesmiths in the late 70s they
did a UN*X workalike called IDRIS whose file system info was kept in
canonical byte-order. There was no measurable performance loss in doing
this compared with UNIX's use of host byte-order. The upside was portable
file systems.

not having any concept of unix internals, would that be a difficult thing
to add? Presumably you could use a bit next to the clean flag to indicate a
canonical byte-order FFS.

cheers,
Danny Thomas  (D.Thomas@vthrc.uq.edu.au)