OS X/FreeBSD shared zfs partition

Boris Kotzev boris.kotzev at gmail.com
Tue Jan 20 11:33:09 PST 2009


> Hi,
>
> I dual boot OS X and FreeBSD (currently 7.0-i386) and have wanted to share a
> partition for storage between the two. I looked into getting HFS+ to work on
> FreeBSD (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1198)<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1198>
> but
> did not succeed. Then I ran across these two pages:
>
> - http://blog.igorminar.com/2009/01/using-zfs-with-mac-os-x-105.html
> - http://zfs.macosforge.org/trac/wiki
>
> I used them to successfully change my Users folder in OS X to a zfs
> filesystem on a partition separate from my main OS X system/boot files. Now
> I just want to mount that partition from FreeBSD. Is this possible? I can
> see the slice in /dev as ad5s3, but there's no partitions on that slice to
> mount (ad5s3a, for example), nor am I familiar enough with ZFS to know what
> it should look like from FreeBSD. I have tried 'mount -t zfs /dev/ad5s3
> /media/temp' without success. zfs.ko is loaded (seen in kldstat) and gives
> the usual message of it being experimental and being version 6.0. In a post
> on the forums (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1613) it was
> suggested that I try 'zpool list' but that returned 'no pools available'. I
> tried 'zfs list' as well and got 'no datasets available'.
>
> My GUID partition table (OS X) and MBR (FreeBSD) are synced, so they both
> show disk0s3 (OS X)/partition 3 as type Solaris (It's 'Solaris Usr' on the
> GPT and type B4 iirc on the MBR). I used an EFI booting program called rEFIt
> to sync the tables - could the MBR type of the slice be the reason I can't
> mount it from FreeBSD?
>
> I've searched long and hard for any posts about using zfs as a way to share
> a partition between any two OSs, but have not found any references on how to
> use a zfs slice as a shared data partition. Can it only be mounted from the
> OS in which it was created? Any thoughts on what I might do here?
>
>
> Thanks much,
> John

I am sorry, I wanted to ask what

zpool import

returns.

Regards,

Boris Kotzev








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