differences in supported filesystems between FreeBSD versions

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/12/05, Glenn Dawson <glenn at antimatter.net> wrote:
> At 10:44 PM 8/11/2005, Dmitry Mityugov wrote:
> >Hello,
> >
> >I have a small FreeBSD machine at home used as a file server and a
> >gateway to the Internet. Currently when a new version of FreeBSD is
> >released (and I have enough time), I copy all the data to another
> >machine, reinstall FreeBSD from scratch, and copy the data back.
> 
> That seems like an awful lot of effort for little to no benfit.

I completely agree, just cvsup like us normal people.

> 
> >I
> >just realized that I probably can keep the data on a separate drive
> >and just reinstall the OS without moving the data back and forth, but
> >I am not sure how safe it is. Is it safe to use a HDD partitioned and
> >formatted by one version of FreeBSD with a newer version? I know there
> >was UFS2 introduced in FreeBSD 5, are there any plans to make any
> >changes to supported file systems in the foreseeable future?
> 
> Even if there were, if the file systems you are using now are working,
> there isn't much reason to change them.
> 
> UFS2 expanded some fields from 32 bits to 64, and added or changed a few
> features, but the two are still very similar.

UFS was reworked to support really big files and to bring in soft
updates, we have UFS2 now and it's not going to change for a long
time, their is some work at making a journaling UFS2 but if it became
a default it wouldn't happen until FreeBSD 7. Big things like
filesystems don't get change on point revisions so if it where to
change it would be on the next major version, FreeBSD 6 has already
been branched so we already know what it's major features will be and
a different filesystem won't be one of them... they are still trying
to get all of the filesystem utilities updated for UFS2, see here:
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/

1982; UFS
2003; UFS2

Post this message again in 19 years when we get UFS3.