Subject: Little endian.

From: Nicu Popovici <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:04:42 -0500

Hello ,

I have the follwing problem. I setup a HardHat distribution on a mips
machine ( an ATLAS board) and everithing runs fine in big-endian mode.
Now I want to run the board inlittle endian mode so I took the
linux/mipsel distribution , I did the same steps as with big-endian
distribution. I run load tftp:/linux/mipsel/vmlinux-el.srec and it works
fine . Then I issue the command go . root=/dev/sda1 ( I do not install
the HardHat again ???? maybe here it is the problem ) I get the
following error.
==========================================================
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing prom memory: 1020k freed
Freeing unused kernel memory: 68k freed
Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.
==========================================================
So please tell me where did I go wrong ?

Nicu

---

From: "Kevin D. Kissell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 19:28:15 +0100

If you want to run little-endian, you need to install
the little-endian binaries and libraries.  Since I needed
to "swing both ways", I put both a big-endian root and
a little-endian root partition on my Atlas disk, with user/data 
partitions that can be mounted on either one - fortunately, 
the Ext2FS metadata seems to be consistent regardless 
of endianness.

            Kevin K.

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 12:45:39 +0100

> the Ext2FS metadata seems to be consistent regardless 

Ext2fs on-disk data structures are defined to be little endian.  Some very
old ext2 filesystems which afaik where all created on Linux/M68K were big
endian; for those e2fsck has the option to change the endianess of the
filesystem during a fsck run; the current kernel will refuse to accept
such big endian ext2 filesystems.

  Ralf

---

From: Carsten Langgaard <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 12:09:37 +0100

I guess, what you want to do is to install a little endian system from a
nfs-server, as you probably did with the bigendian system. If this is the
case then you shouldn't issue the 'go . root=/dev/sda1' command, as you
haven't installed the root filesystem yet.
Instead you should use this command: 'go . nfsroot=<ipaddr-of-nfsserver>
....'

/Carsten

---

From: Geert Uytterhoeven <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 13:51:17 +0100 (CET)

> such big endian ext2 filesystems.

For correctness: early Linux/PPC used big-endian ext2 as well. IIRC we switched
to little-endian ext2 on m68k in late 1996, and on PPC in late 1997 / early
1998.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [email-masked]

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds