ext2fs: ext2 vs. ext3

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:43:20 +0100 (CET) Oliver Fromme
<olli at lurza.secnetix.de> wrote:

> 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.

The sysutils/fusefs-ntfs port does not work for you?

> 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?

There is some GSoC code in P4 which made some extensions regarding
ext3/ext4 (see http://wiki.freebsd.org/SOC2010ZhengLiu). The author is
probably able to tell you more what you can expect from the code in
8.x and his extensions.

Bye,
Alexander.