Re: Off topic question about HD filesystems

[Jeff Sheinberg <jeffsh@erols.com>]

Magnus Sandberg writes:
 > This questions is not actually related to Debian-BSD but maybe somebody can 
 > give me some hints.
 > 
 > I plan to have a dual boot system with both Debian (Linux) and *BSD, 
 > probably OpenBSD or FreeBSD. I would like to let both OS-es share /opt 
 > where I put home accounts, download areas, etc and my question is -
 > Which filesystem is handled best by both Linux and BSD?
 > 
 > Does *BSD handle ext2 okay or does Linux handle UFS better?

Here is a summary of my experience,

    1. FreeBSD 4.0 - has no native fsck for ext2.  Doing mkfifo
    caused a kernel panic (but the fifo was created first!).  Does
    not support newer ext2 features (sparse super, etc).

    2. OpenBSD 2.7 - has the best ext2fs support, but the
    partition support for any disks without a partition containing
    a BSD disklabel is buggy.

    3. Linux 2.2.17 - ufs is buggy, turning on writing can create
    bad symlinks.  Even in ro mode, sometimes an out of partition
    disk block is requested.

    4. NetBSD 1.4.2 - I don't remember about ext2, it was too long
    ago, but be warned - NetBSD will write non-standard partition
    tables, which can be easily fixed (by an expert).

HTH,
-- 
Jeff Sheinberg  <jeffsh@erols.com>