Re: initramfs buffer spec -- second draft

[H. Peter Anvin]

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