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

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mar 23, 2007, at 12:15 PM, Erik Trulsson wrote:

> 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.

Sorry. I meant "snapshots", a feature of softupdates, which according  
to McKusick (dev author of softupdates?) are available post 5.0.  
Reference: <http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/>.

-Garrett