Linux filesystems accessible from FreeBSD 8-stable?

Frank Shute frank at shute.org.uk
Fri Sep 24 19:48:04 UTC 2010


On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 01:59:40PM -0400, Leif Walsh wrote:
>
> I can't seem to get a definitive answer on this from the internet,
> there's a lot of conflicting information.
> 
> I have some data drives formatted with ext4, which I'd like to access
> from freebsd, preferably without totally reformatting because I don't
> have much temp space for copying.  Read-only would be fine, read-write
> would be much preferred.
> 
> Is this possible?  Am I missing the big "ext4 drivers in
> freebsd/fuse/something" sign?  Does anyone happen to know if it's
> possible to migrate an ext4 drive back to ext3, which it seems I can
> access from bsd if I let it pretend the journal doesn't exist?
> 

Wikipedia seems to think you're right in thinking you can migrate (or
mount only?) an ext4 as ext3:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

AFAIK and I stand to be corrected, in FreeBSD you mount ext3 as ext2.
Whether you can mount ext4 as ext2; I don't know and I can't test.

But it looks like you can't:

http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-3377.html

and this Status report suggests support is being written:

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2009-04-2009-09.html

You might wan't to drop the guy who was hoping to do it (Aditya
Sarawgi) an email.

ext3 can be read and written to on FreeBSD but the journal becomes out
of date which is corrected when you boot up Linux and mount the
filesystems as ext3.


Regards,

-- 

 Frank

 Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html




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