Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 13 Jan 2002 15:12:46 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 13 Jan 2002 15:12:36 -0500 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:27409 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sun, 13 Jan 2002 15:12:22 -0500 Message-ID: <3C41EA0D.2050205@zytor.com> Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 12:11:57 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, sv MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Eric W. Biederman" CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: initramfs buffer spec -- second draft In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > Comments. Endian issues are not specified, is the data little, big > or vax endian? > Not applicable. There are no endian-specific binary structure in the format AT ALL. ASCII-coded fields are always bigendian. > What is the point of alignment? If the data starts as 4 byte aligned, > the 6 byte magic string guarantees the data will be only 2 byte > aligned. This isn't good for 32 or 64 bit architectures. They're ASCII-coded, so it supposedly doesn't matter (yet, it's a bit daft, but blame the SysV people.) The alignment makes sure the *data* field is 4-byte aligned. > I do like having a c_magic that at least allows us to change things > in the future if necessary. It's pretty clear from a lot of the comments that a number of people haven't understood that the cpio encapsulation *THIS IS A CODIFICATION OF AN EXISTING FORMAT.* -hpa - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/