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Subjecta stupid question about Xenix (SysV) file system support
Date
A file 'Configure.help' from 2.2 kernels says:

CONFIG_SYSV_FS
SCO, Xenix and Coherent are commercial Unix systems for Intel
machines, and Version 7 was used on the DEC PDP-11. Saying Y here
would allow you to read to and write from their floppies and hard
disk partitions.

and this does not mention any restrictions.

OTOH include/linux/sysv_fs.h opens with the following comment:

/* This code assumes
- a little endian processor like 386,
- sizeof(short) = 2, sizeof(int) = 4, sizeof(long) = 4,
- alignof(short) = 2, alignof(long) = 4.
*/

This comment may well be a forgotten leftover from 2.0.x days and it
should be really gone; it looks like that some overhaul of this code
was really done and, at least this particular header, defines things
in terms of 'u16's, 'u32's and similar in place of unsigned shorts and
longs. Still an attempt to mount on a Linux (Alpha) machine a disk
from Xenix ground immediately to a halt with messages about unrecognized
disk label and other complaints of that sort.

Moreover a querry on dejanews brought back a bunch of qoutes like
that (spelling of the original; "divvy slices" is an AT&T/Xenix-speak
for disk partitioning):
"I don't beleive the xenix fs support can handle the divvy slices on a
hard drive partition. I know it can read floppies, as I have done so
countless times..."
and no reports of success. It does not look like that Alphas were
involved at all.

Does anybody know what is the real status of this code and if one may
really need, in a general case, some "unofficial" patches not included
in standard kernels?

Is the comment mentioned above only an "editor bug"?

Thanks,
Michal

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