Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 15 Jan 2002 16:29:49 -0800 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: initramfs buffer spec -- second draft |
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Andreas Dilger wrote:
> > But the proposed cpio format (AFAIK) has ASCII numbers, which is what you > were originally complaining about. I see that cpio(1) says that "by > default, cpio creates binary format archives... and can read archives > created on machines with a different byte-order". > > Excluding alignment issues (which can also be handled relatively easily), > is there a reason why we chose the ASCII format over binary, especially > since the binary format _appears_ to be portable (assuming endian > conversions at decoding time), despite warnings to the contrary? >
The "binary" format of cpio is *ancient*. There is no binary equivalent to the "newc" (SVR4) format.
> The binary format reports lots of "truncating inode number", but for > the purpose of initramfs, that is not an issue as we don't anticipate > more than 64k files. I don't know why the /sbin test is so heavily > in favour of the newc (ASCII) format, but I repeated it to confirm > the numbers.
There are way too many other problems with the ancient cpio formats. Not an option.
-hpa
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