Upgrade from 4.x -> 6.2: Old file systems?

[Erik Trulsson]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 11:36:21AM -0700, youshi10 at u.washington.edu wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, Brett Glass wrote:
> 
> >I have a server which I am considering upgrading from 4.11 to 6.2. Besides 
> >the operating system disk (which contains all of the expected partitions 
> >such as /, /usr, /var, and /tmp), There's a large data disk on the system 
> >containing useful data that I'd like to put back online as soon as the 
> >upgrade is completed. I'd rather not have to reformat it unless there is a 
> >significant advantage to doing so. Does 6.2 work properly with the older 
> >disk format? Is there any reason to take the time and effort to back up 
> >the data and restore it to the new format? Is there anything I'll need to 
> >be careful about if I upgrade just the system disk?
> >
> >--Brett Glass
> 
> Brett,
>     Yes, 6.2 does but there are features that were added to UFS2 
>     (softupdates, file size limit raised past 2GB?) which make it a much 
>     better filesystem infrastructure than UFS1.

The things you mention (softupdates, large files) were and are well supported
with UFS1 too.  There were not really much features added with UFS2 (support
for very large disks (> 1 TB) and some support for extra flags and
attributes are what I can think of right now.)

There is not really any significant gains to be had from converting the
existing file systems from UFS1 to UFS2.
FreeBSD 6.2 should work just fine with the older disk.




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se