Re: tar vs cpio (was: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file)

H. Peter Anvin
2001-12-23T19:18:27Z

T. A. wrote:

> What about considering one of the simpler filesystems or archive formats
> instead? How much "Unix"-ism is required to be retained in the archive?
> (permissions, device files, etc?)
>

They're MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH worse. Don't even think abou it.

> As for the bigendianness... Is it really relevant since each kernel is
> tied to its own platform? And if it is may it be better to use the native
> format of the 98% or so of the Linux machines out there which are
> littleendian (performance and ease of general access on the majority of host
> machines comes to mind).

This was discussed recently... doing a nonportable format is begging for
problems. The only reason I'm suggesting bigendian is that conversion
to bigendian macros are more widely available in the form of the
standard hton macros.

-hpa