Re: minixfs bitmaps and associated lossage

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 11:04:51PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> 	So...  What the hell can we do?  Layouts (4) and (5) are clearly
> broken and _never_ worked - there's nothing that would manage to create
> such filesystem.  So these are obvious candidates for switching - either
> to (2) (correct) or to (3) (broken, but at least match util-linux fsck.minix
> and mkfs.minix on such platforms).  The question being, what do we do with
> (3) (big-endian metadata, little-endian bitmaps) and what do we do with
> Linux fsck.minix?  Aside of repeating the mantra, that is ("All Software
> Sucks, All Hardware Sucks")...

For parisc (and I suspect many other architectures), the situation
is clear.  Nobody has ever used minixfs, and the only possible reason
to use it is for data transfer from another system.  Now, there's more
i386/minix systems in existence than there are m68k/minix, so I'd actually
prefer to switch parisc to support the LE minix format.  Or, since that
would involve doing work for something that nobody would ever use, just
disabling it on parisc.  If anyone ever wants it, they can do the work.