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Re: test case bin3 failed in my x86_64 box
Hi -
On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 08:39:21AM -0700, Hien Nguyen wrote:
> >What program is to read this data? How? Why expect it to have
> >problems with (say) native endianness?
>
> How do we handle data were captured on one machine and being
> analyzed on another machine?
If you meant that as an additional question, then the answers to my
questions probably imply a reasonable answer to yours.
If you meant that rhetorically (to answer my question about endianness),
I would expect that a program that processes binary traces of the realm
of complexity that we are contemplating generating (varying records types
and lengths) would either
- require metadata to describe records, which then might as well include
an identification of native endianness
- be smart enough to deduce it, perhaps based on a single magic number
similar to the ELF header word
- be sadly inflexible in these ways, in which case the trace data is likely
to contain trivial fixed-sized bits, which would be produced from a small
number of script probes/functions, which then might as well hard-code
endianness in the formatting directives.
I know, "not necessarily" is a come-back to all of the above, but I
think the generalities hold.
- FChE