Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 15:43:06 -0400 (EDT) From: rodsmith@rodsbooks.com (Rod Smith) To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: xfs? Message-ID: <20020514194306.AB92A2B80A@speaker.rodsbooks.com> In-Reply-To: <015801c1faf0$124177e0$0300a8c0@zeus>
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---Reply to mail from Patrick O. Fish about xfs? > Does FreeBSD support XFS(aka ext3, ReiserFS, XFS)? First, I'm not sure if you don't understand the meaning of "aka" or if you don't realize that ext3fs, ReiserFS, and XFS are entirely different and largely unrelated filesystems. "aka" is an abbreviation for "also known as," and indicates that the words are synonymous. These three filesystem names are NOT synonymous. Second, FreeBSD does support ext2fs, upon which ext3fs is based. The last I checked, FreeBSD's ext2fs support was not the most stable in the world, so it's inadvisable to use it too much, especially for read/write access. Ext3fs is basically just ext2fs with journaling features added. It's supposedly compatible with ext2fs, to the extent that an ext2fs driver should be able to read an ext3fs partition, although possibly not write to it. I don't know if this is true of FreeBSD's ext2fs support, though. Third, searches on Google turn up references to discussions of adding ReiserFS and XFS to FreeBSD, including at least one archived mailing list post from somebody working on XFS for FreeBSD: http://www.stacken.kth.se/lists/arla-drinkers/2001-12/msg00012.html (Note: I can't be 100% sure this is the same XFS that's a filesystem for IRIX and Linux.) It looks like these projects are just getting underway. Most of the hits are questions like yours on mailing lists, so I can't even be sure how much development work is actually going on. Fourth, you omitted mention of JFS, which is another journaling filesystem. This one at least has an official "home" on the Internet for a FreeBSD port: http://jfs4bsd.sourceforge.net/ Depending upon you reason for wanting a Linux journaling filesystem support in FreeBSD, this may be another contender, but at the moment, only the utilities now even compile, much less work correctly. Overall, if you want to see support for any of the Linux journaling filesystems in FreeBSD, your best bet is to contribute to the development of code, since nothing is currently useable, AFAIK. There ARE people who are interested in this topic, though. Finally, FreeBSD supports a feature known as "softupdates," which isn't the same as journaling, but accomplishes a similar set of goals. Softupdates works with the traditional FreeBSD FFS/UFS, so if you don't need a journaling filesystem for Linux interoperability, but for the features it provides, enabling softupdates is probably the way to go. -- Rod Smith rodsmith@rodsbooks.com http://www.rodsbooks.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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