moving disks between archs

James Tanis jtanis at pycoder.org
Fri Feb 10 21:52:19 PST 2006


On 2/10/06, Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 12:51:18PM -0500, James Tanis wrote:
> > Tar will work, but not a drive formatted on an i386 with a tar file on
> > it.
>
> Not if you store the tar file in a UFS filesystem on the drive, but I
> suggested writing it to the raw disk where it is just a stream of bits
> and therefore endian-neutral.
>

That would imply that endianness is a function of the OS/filesystem
rather than the architecture, which is wrong. If you don't take my
word for it, a quick google will find you,
(http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/support_for_x86.html)..
"File systems are neutral to endianness in general, and swapping files
between Solaris SPARC and x86 is not an issue. But applications
storing raw data that can be shared between platforms would be an
issue. For example, if an application on the Solaris SPARC platform
writes the data structures in a raw format to the files, then the data
stored in these files would be endian-dependent."


>
> P.S. Don't top-post, it ruins continuity.
>
Bah, think outside the box.

>  If its a sparc, why not just plug it into the network temporarily?
> > Ive never seen a sparc without an integrated ethernet card.
> >
> > On 2/9/06, Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 11:37:45PM +0100, Paolino wrote:
> > > > I'm using a disk to bring data to an network-isolated machine  running
> > > > sparc. What filesystem can I use to get some compatibility?
> > > >
> > > > Having placed an UFS from an i386, makes it unreadable on the sparc, IRC
> > > > guys tought me it's an endiannes problem.
> > > >
> > > > Is tar going to work ?
> > >
> > > tar will work, so you can always write the tar file to the raw disk
> > > (i.e. use no filesystem).
> > >
> > > Kris
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > James Tanis
> > jtanis at pycoder.org
> > http://pycoder.org
> >
>
>
>


--
James Tanis
jtanis at pycoder.org
http://pycoder.org


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