Partitioning for multiple systems

Pete Carah peter at cerona.com
Thu May 21 22:00:06 UTC 2009


Some points - I've done most of these...

1. Grub can boot from a secondary partition (my current laptop has a 
recovery partition in 1, vista (boooo) in 2, fbsd in 3, and linux in 4 
as 2 secondary partitions.)  works fine.  Grub doesn't boot vista 
correctly, but handles bsd fine and (of course) linux.

2. Linux as of 2.6.27 can mount ufs2 once you figure out the incantation 
(you need -t ufs and -o ufstype=ufs2).  I don't know if this is ok r/w 
or not; I leave the ntfs (actually all non-self) filesystems ro.  (the 
linux ntfs-3g is supposedly safe for r/w and even growing files.  Since 
it runs in userland over fuse it should port easily to fbsd.  I don't 
know if that applies to the vista version of ntfs.)

3. BSD's ext2 driver (on stable) can't yet handle the 256-byte inodes 
that most modern linux's install on.  /boot tends to be 128-byte and 
pure ext2.  A journal replay would be a nice addition to fbsd's ext2 
driver but isn't needed if linux was "properly" shut down.

So this laptop has the ntfs and bsd mounted readonly in linux, ntfs 
mounted in bsd but only the grub partition (which is secondary - ad4s5) 
of the linux stuff mounted in bsd.  The geom-linux-lvm does indeed work 
on this laptop, and mount finds and mounts the main linux partition; 
then any reference gets an errno back, apparently due to the inode 
length issue.

I saw a request for mfc of the fix for this (it is apparently in 
fbsd-current, and already pr'd regarding 7-stable.)

-- Pete



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