On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 03:45:07PM +0000, dittigas wrote: > On Sun, 2004-01-11 at 06:39, Michael Sternberg wrote: > > Hello > > What are my options for sharing data between Linux and Win2K on > > dual boot computer ? I need read/write access from both OS to a > > shared partition, until now I used FAT. Do we have something > > better ? > > There are Captive's hosted native windows drivers (full r/w) available > for linux. See more info here: > http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2171 >
Full read/write yes, but does it really give you that much more than VFAT? What does one actually want from a filesystem these days? * Long filenames - mostly all give you. ext2/3 better than vfat (and better than ntfs, I think) - ext2/3 give you full case sensitivity, while vfat can't have e.g. both "abcd" and "Abcd", but it's good enough. * Unix semantics - e.g. soft and hard links (ntfs has only hard (and I am not sure captive supports them - did anyone check?)), vfat none), device files (e.g. if you want your "/" to be on it) - none, etc. * good performance - I did not check it, but I find it hard to believe that a native Linux driver won't easily beat an NT driver that goes through another level (maybe more than one) of emulation. * reliability - that might be the big point. I guess the captive driver will eventually, even if not now, be much better than fat, considering the logging of ntfs. * security semantics - vfat has none, but so is captive. NTFS does have a lot of security semantics, and is implemented quite well in NT. For example, if you have two NT installations on a machine, and you give some file a permission for a local user of one of them, the other won't know what to do (and will say the permissions are for an "account unknown"). But if both of them belong to the same domain, and you give permissions to a domain user, both will see it the same. It's true that in Linux it's even more transparent (some might say better, some worse) - you can have in two installations the same /etc/passwd files (in addition to the NT equivalent of being in the same YP or other domain) and the permissions will be the same. However, captive works the same as fat - you tell it who the owner of the file system is, what permissions each and every file on it has (only one - just as fat), and that's it. The current sad situation is that you can't have a dualboot machine with any security semantics shared by two OSes. The closest you can have is read-only (or append-only) ones - iso9660 and udf (I didn't try using nondefault permissions with either, BTW, and would love to hear stories). If you have such needs, the best thing you can do is access it from the network, through samba/nfs. If that's not an option (it isn't if you have only one machine), you simply can't have it. umsdos gives you all of the unix features, but not on Windows. On Windows, you'll see only variations of the short 8.3 versions of the names of your files. I used to have my root filesystem on umsdos, and while it did have problems, and I eventually got rid of it, it did work quite well. uvfat was supposed to be umsdos with the vfat long filenames, so that you would loose nothing by mounting with it, but it's dead. If uvfat was being developed more intensively, I think it could have been a good alternative for some uses, but in the current state of things, I think vfat is the best option. It's simple, it's common, it's everywhere, supported by virtually every OS in the world (natively, and also by mtools, if not natively), you can access it from a DOS boot floppy if you have such weird needs, the Linux driver and dosfstools are very mature, you need it anyway for things like digital cameras, and although it's very primitive and featureless, it's here to stay. -- Didi > BTW Kernel 2.6 has NTFS support for r/w (CONFIG_NTFS_RW). Its seems that > 2.6.1 now supports (_safe_) r/w as well, though very restrictive (e.g. > modify only, no change in file length) whice is probably useless unless > for distro's such as TopologyLinux which use a single-file logical disk > on fat/ntfs. It's mostly the same driver as on linux-ntfs.sf.net. Works well for things like TopologyLinux (I managed to copy an existing ext3 partition and boot from it while it's on ntfs, and as I said in another thread some months ago, this is my intention for our next instaparty), but is not an option for what the OP asked (keeping files, e.g. /home, shared). -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
