On 24 August 2010 06:53, Thomas Mueller <[email protected]> wrote: > What is the best choice for a file system that can be read, and safely > written to, by Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD?
I've been trying NTFS(-3g). It's been going well, with even occasional Windows thrown in the mix. But it is very slow, mostly, I believe, due to being an userspace implementation. And I do keep backups. > With NetBSD through 5.1_RC3, I got "unsupported inode size" when trying to > mount Linux ext2fs partition from NetBSD. I've tested ext2/3 in the past, found it very risky to mix OSs (Linux and FreeBSD only, though). FreeBSD's Ext2 seemed very lacky regarding new FS features. I wouldn't risk it. > There is the obvious possibility of using msdos (FAT32); I could run FreeDOS > on such a partition as well as using the partition to share data between > Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD, and FreeDOS too. Drawback is some problems > getting long file names straight, and lack of case sensitivity. But maybe > FAT32 is the safest choice? IMHO NTFS should be better, also, NTFS-3G has an (opensource friendly?) company behind it: http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ > Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD are supposed to be able to read and write NTFS > partition, but I see from a very recent thread on this list, subject "Re: > External HD", that writing to NTFS partition is very dangerous, and I figure > that would be also true for NetBSD and Linux, and any other > non-MS-Windows-NT-line OS that might have support for NTFS. I haven't seen recent horror stories about NTFS use on Linux, since the userspace/fuse implementations. Haven't had any problemas myself too. Except for a hiccup: one of the implementations (can't remember which) would semi-silently ignore files/paths for which it couldn't parse the charset, that it, it didn't copy the files/dirs, also didn't error, just spit some mumbling in dmesg (this was on Linux also). So beware of your FS charset. As Joshua Isom mentioned, there's also UDF. But IIRC FreeBSD wasn't able to write on it when I checked. Also slow compared to native FSs (same league or worse than the userspace NTFSs). I'd love to go with UDF, if only it had better support/performance. And don't underestimate your backups. -- (nil) _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
