Re: Off topic question about HD filesystems

[Magnus Sandberg <Magnus.Sandberg@sth.frontec.se>]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your information. If I understand you correctly OpenBSD has best 
support for ext2, and I guess that OpenBSD does ext2 better than Linux does 
UFS. Is that correct?

You say that OpenBSD need to have a BSD disklabel to do it correct. Can a 
Linux system boot on that type of disk, in a dual boot configuration? Maybe 
we should continue this discussion in private emails, it is getting to 
specific and maybe even more off topic.

If OpenBSD is the best choice, then I'll make my security friend happy - 
he's always talking about OpenBSD.... :-)


                                  _\\|//_
                                  (-0-0-)
/-------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo------------------------------\
| Magnus Sandberg                    Email: Magnus.Sandberg@bluelabs.se  |
| Network Engineer, BlueLabs AB                  http://www.bluelabs.se/ |
| Phone: +46-8-470 2155    (FAX: +46-8-470 2199)    GSM: +46-708-225 805 |
\------------------------------------------------------------------------/
                                  ||   ||
                                 ooO   Ooo


 ----- On 21st of November 2000 Jeff Sheinberg wrote; -----

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>