Re: Move md raid5 from intel to sparc?

[Matthew Mitchell <matthew@geodev.com>]

Mike Tran wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 10:02, Matthew Mitchell wrote:
> 
>>Hello everyone,
>>
>>In the interest of keeping around some otherwise-functional Sparcs, I 
>>was asked if it would be possible to move a linux md raid set from an 
>>Intel box to a Sun box.  I said, "Sure," and then immediately wondered 
>>about byte ordering -- will this work?  Take the SCSI box off of the 
>>intel, plug it into the sparc, and try to run the array...
>>
>>Then my next thought was that someone here would know the answer. :)
>>
> 
> 
> It will not work. The on-disk MD superblock is written using cpu arch
> format.  Furthermore, let's say you are able to re-create the raid5
> array after moving it to the Sun box.  What about the filesystem and
> data?  At least you need a filesystem which manipulates its metadata in
> neutral format for this kind of "move" to work.

As I feared.

What _about_ the filesystem and data, though?  Some filesystems are 
certainly written in a known byte-order, like ISO 9660.  Are there any 
of (ext3, XFS, JFS, reiserfs) that this is true for?  Or are they all 
written in cpu native byte-order?

-- 
Matthew Mitchell
Systems Programmer/Administrator            matthew@geodev.com
Geophysical Development Corporation         phone 713 782 1234
1 Riverway Suite 2100, Houston, TX  77056     fax 713 782 1829