ext2fs: ext2 vs. ext3

[Oliver Fromme]

Hi!

I've bought a small external disk (2.5", 1 TB) to use for
my media player in the living room.  My plan is to connect
it to my FreeBSD 8 workstation in order to fill and update
it.

The media player is Linux-based, so I can't use UFS.  Even
worse, it refuses to mount ext2, while ext3 seems to work
fine.  So my only choice is to format the disk with ext3,
because FAT has a 4 GB limit and NTFS is unsupported on
FreeBSD for practical purposes.

Now here's my question:  Are there any problems to be
expected when mounting an ext3fs partition alternately on
a Linux machine and a FreeBSD machine?  Both will mount it
read+write (the media player writes some index or cache
files to it).

As far as I know, FreeBSD supports ext2 only, and even
though ext3 is supposed to be backwards compatible, FreeBSD
doesn't know how to handle the ext3 journal.  Can this
cause any problems in the long run?

Would it help to run fsck.ext3 from the sysutils/e2fsprogs
port every time after I have updated the file system on my
FreeBSD machine?  (The media player has fsck, too, but it
seems to run out of memory on the 1 TB disk.)

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

Best regards
   Oliver

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Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M.
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