On Fri, 6 Oct 2000, Jarom=EDr Dolecek wrote:

# Salvatore Mancini wrote:
# > what are BE and LE?
#=20
# Big or Little Endian, respectively. In case you don't know,
# this means how the machine is 'physically' laying bytes.
# LE machines lay 16 bit value like higher byte before the
# lower one, BE the other way around.

First, reverse that -- Little Endian machines lay the lower bytes before
the higher bytes; Big Endian machines lay the high-order bytes first.
Secondly, VAXen are little endian machines and depending on whether the
value in question is a short or a long, it lays the entirety in reverse
order.  32-bit values get laid out in reverse order.

Take 3735928559 (decimal), for example:
=09Big-endian:=09=09=09de ad be ef
=09Little-endian, word-oriented:=09ad de fe eb
=09Little-endian, long-oriented:=09fe eb ad de

<trivia>
This is evident when you try to restore a VAX filesystem dump on a
Sun.  You will see the diagnostic

=09NOTICE:  Doing quad swapping

appear at the beginning of the restore.

#=20
# Jaromir
#=20
# > > Stargate Industries, LLC - Network Operations Center wrote:
# > > > I don't suppose the NTFS code will work on other ports?
# > >
# > > There is nothing inherently non-portable in there. Since
# > > it has not been tested on any BE machine, I expect it to have
# > > quite a few LE dependencies (and hence could fail mysteriously
# > > on BE machines). It might "just work" for LE architectures
# > > other than i386.
# > > Once I get myself mac68k, I'd be able to even do some tests
# > > myself - IIRC, m68k are BE :)
# > >
# > > Jaromir
# > > --
# > > Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~do=
lecek/
# > > @@@@  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, damn!  @@@@
# >=20
# >=20
# >=20
#=20
#=20
# --=20
# Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolece=
k/
# @@@@  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, damn!  @@@@
#=20


=09=09=09=09--*greywolf;

=09/* Need OpenSource servers?  Try BSD - Solid as a Rock. */