Re: [ANN] Squashfs 3.0 released

[Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 09:15:41PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > >Can you try to benchmark it? I believe it is going to be lost in
> > >noise, slow cpus or not.
> > 
> > Good idea, I'll try to benchmark it (on a slow CPU if I can find one :-) 
> > ).  It will probably make no difference.
> > 
> > I don't want the lack of a fixed endianness on disk to become a problem. 
> >   I personally don't think the use of, or lack of a fixed endianness to 
> > be that important, but I'd prefer not to change the current situation 
> > and adopt a fixed format.  I use big endian systems almost exclusively, 
> > and I don't like the way fixed formats always tend to be little-endian.
> 
> Fix it to big-endian, then. Network protocols are big-endian, anyway,
> and PCs tend to be so fast that byteswap will be lost in cache misses,
> anyway.

Note that "sometimes we swap" approach tends to create tons of bugs.
It's much easier to keep track of "this variable is host-endian, this
one is big-endian" and have appropriate conversions where needed.  Trying
to keep track of how many times we need to swap on this, this and that
codepath, OTOH, almost always ends up buggy.