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Jan Vorbrueggen

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Dec 8, 1995, 3:00:00 AM12/8/95
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[discussion about (non-)reasons for NT's endianness deleted]

I would think the major reason Microsoft insists NT run only on one endianness
(which happens to be little) is transparent data-sharing: imagine a system
such as a VMScluster (soon to be ported to NT) in which every system can read
all the disks. How do you know that the data your application is reading is
little- or big-endian? You run into a lot of conversion issues, which (at the
very least) will eat into I/O performance. Naw, it's not worth the hassle -
every decent processor can be switched at boot time anyways.

Jan

Lewis E. Wolfgang

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Dec 8, 1995, 3:00:00 AM12/8/95
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In article <JAN.95De...@cora.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>,

Jan Vorbrueggen <j...@neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
>
>I would think the major reason Microsoft insists NT run only on one endianness
>(which happens to be little) is transparent data-sharing: imagine a system
>such as a VMScluster (soon to be ported to NT) in which every system can read
>all the disks. How do you know that the data your application is reading is
>little- or big-endian? You run into a lot of conversion issues, which (at the
>very least) will eat into I/O performance. Naw, it's not worth the hassle -
>every decent processor can be switched at boot time anyways.

The hassles have been overcome in the past. Sun's xdr library has been around
since 1986 or before. I recall having Motorola, SPARC and Intel based systems
all talking together via NFS in a seamless fashion. The xdr library took care
of the external data representations.

Regards,
Lew Wolfgang

Jukka Marin

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Dec 10, 1995, 3:00:00 AM12/10/95
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wolf...@sunspot.nosc.mil (Lewis E. Wolfgang) writes:

>In article <JAN.95De...@cora.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>,
>Jan Vorbrueggen <j...@neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
>>
>>I would think the major reason Microsoft insists NT run only on one endianness
>>(which happens to be little) is transparent data-sharing: imagine a system
>>such as a VMScluster (soon to be ported to NT) in which every system can read
>>all the disks. How do you know that the data your application is reading is
>>little- or big-endian?

>The hassles have been overcome in the past. Sun's xdr library has been around


>since 1986 or before. I recall having Motorola, SPARC and Intel based systems
>all talking together via NFS in a seamless fashion.

Yep, I'm running NetBSD on Amigas and peecees and they can all talk to each
other and to Sparcs running SunOS. No problems at all.

-jm

--

I'm not lazy - I'm only selectively motivated

---> http://www.jmp.fi/~jmarin/ <---

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