Best filesysyem for FreeBSD & Linux shared partition

[Vasil Dimov]

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I am multibooting FreeBSD with a few Linux distributions such as Mandrake,
> Gentoo, Slackware, Red Hat. (I'll reduce that list to a couple of favourites
> eventually).
> 
> I have set up a primary partition with ext2 filesystem to act as a single
> data partition accessable from all OSs. That seemed to be fine until
> recently when I ran out of room on my FreeBSD /usr directory and moved my
> /usr/ports/distfiles directory to the shared ext2fs partition. At first
> there seemed to be no problems but when I tried to upgrade KDE and XFree86
> using portupgrade the error messages began.
> 
> XFree86 always encountered errors when checking the checksums of the source
> tarballs. It would say at first that the checksums were ok but then
> immediately after crash sying that there were crc errors.
> 
> KDE was more serious. It would almost immediately crash with a Fatal Trap 12
> error and reboot.
> 
> After finding nothing on the on the forums  I finally moved the distfiles to
> a new drive which I formatted with the FreeBSD ufs filesystem. VOILA!! No
> more problems.
> 
> So it seems that FreeBSD support for ext2fs is at fault.
> 
> So what is the best filesystem to use for a shared partition? For example,
> does FreeBSD provide better support for ext3fs or resierfs? Or does Linux
> provide better support for ufs?
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Ron

Yes: "FreeBSD support for ext2fs is at fault" also is the
"Linux support for UFS". I suggest using FAT32 if you do
not care about 755 permissions and root:wheel owner on all files
(/usr/ports/distfiles is a good example for this). You can
also try sysutils/e2fsprogs and/or sysutils/linux-e2fsprogs from
the ports.