Re: git: 01d5910b8766 - stable/15 - pkg-stage.sh: Add ext2 and ntfs

On 5/15/26 07:43, Mark Millard wrote:
> On 5/14/26 23:24, Colin Percival wrote:
>> On 5/14/26 20:37, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 06:53:32PM +0000, Colin Percival wrote:
>>>> commit 01d5910b8766671afdbd9e274fd62b397aca9e1a
>>>>
>>>>    pkg-stage.sh: Add ext2 and ntfs
>>>>
>>>>    Having these packages available on release media may help users who
>>>>    need to sneakernet other packages (e.g. firmware) from systems
>>>> running
>>>>    Linux or Windows.
>>>
>>> FreeBSD supports extfs (rw) natively, what's the need for FUSE-ext2?
>>
>> The "ext2" fusefs port also handles ext3 and ext4.  Poorly named port, I
>> suppose...
>>
> 
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ext2fs reports about ext2fs.ko :
> 
> QUOTE
> This page serves to keep some notes related to FreeBSD's kernel
> implementation that supports the original ext2 and sufficient features
> to support newer versions of the popular filesystem.
> . . .
> In FreeBSD ext2, ext3 and ext4 are not different filesystems: ext2 is
> the base filesystem and some features from ext3 and ext4 are supported.
> All features in FreeBSD's implementation follow UFS semantics and this
> can sometimes impose important differences.
> 
> All supported FreeBSD versions support ext2/3/4 read and write with most
> of the features, except for journaling.
> FreeBSD 13-current supports Big Endian Platforms, including PowerPC,
> through byteswapping.
> FreeBSD 12.1 and later have support for DTrace to enable debugging in
> production.
> FreeBSD 12+ includes initial support for writing ext4 filesystems
> (thanks to Fedor Uporov).
> FreeBSD 10.1-12 used by default reallocblk. This comes from UFS and
> helps preventing defragmentation issues. Linux doesn't have an exact
> equivalent but Ext4 does delayed allocation which is similar in concept.
> In freeBSD 12 the feature was disabled by default as it proved to be
> unstable.
> FreeBSD 9.x+ fully supports the async mode, which is the default on
> Linux. Unlike Linux, the default is to use the sync mode which will make
> your filesystem more reliable at the cost of some performance.
> . . .
> Known issues
> 
> We don't support the inline_data feature: it is doable, just no one has
> done it.
> We support Extended Attributes, but we don't have the calls to support
> ACLs in a similar way to other BSD filesystems (namely UFS).
> We lack support for journaling which is inconvenient but is not
> necessarily a problem if you are OK with running in sync mode.
> Furthermore, at least in the Linux implementation, journaling is known
> to reduce performance.
> We don't support the SSD trim command: the code to merge this feature
> from UFS is relatively simple but while on Linux this is a mount option,
> in FreeBSD's UFS this is set in tunefs. For convenience we always choose
> to keep the same semantics as in UFS, so it's unsupported (for now).
> Starting from ext2fsprogs v1.43, Linux distributions are activated the
> 64 bit feature even when partitions are smaller than 16T. This feature
> caused problems for some Linux bootloaders and utilities. This is
> supported in FreeBSD as of FreeBSD 12+.
> END QUOTE
> 
> (Not mentioned is lack of encryption, if other things I read are correct.)
> 
> 
> 

It looks like:

https://forums.ghostbsd.org/d/694-hi-new-here-and-to-bsd

documents more detailed tradeoffs between FreeBSD's ext2fs and
fuse-ext2, as of early this year.

I've not found such for sysutils/fusefs-lkl for ext4.

-- 
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com