Questions from a Linux refugee

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 06 Jan 2015 15:45:46 +0100, Rolf Nielsen wrote:
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> On 2015-01-06 12:33, Polytropon wrote:
> > On Tue, 6 Jan 2015 11:55:03 +0100, Lev wrote:
> >> 1. Lack of ext4 support. As a Linux user, I have lots of disks
> >> with ext4 partition, and I simply wanted to copy files, but
> >> failed. I might be naive, but ext4 is open, so why can't FreeBSD
> >> have native support for ext4?
> > 
> > Because of the amount of available file systems especially in Linux
> > (more than 5), having them supported along with the operating
> > system (!) is not FreeBSD's way to go. Instead you can find support
> > in 3rd party software: The ports collection contains fuse which
> > allows you to access many kinds of different file systems.
> 
> Isn't the issue more about ext4 being GPL licensed than about
> maintaining support for several filesystems?

ZFS support is CDDL, not BSDL, but even though I think the goal
of getting the OS free of GNU and GPL stuff leads to attempts
to have as much BSDL code in base as possible, not having ext4
support in the OS (kernel!) is a technical consideration. On
Linux, significant parts of the file system access are being
implemented in the kernel, but FreeBSD's kernel simply isn't
a Linux kernel. So moving this functionality into userland
(with FUSE) is probably the better approach. You don't want
to break your kernel by adding bells & whistles just to cope
with this week's newest fashion of "the standard file system". :-)

With FUSE, foreign file systems can be easier interfaced with
because their "lower level functions" are implemented against
FreeBSD's virtual file system support. All this can stay in
userland, without interfering with the kernel and the common
userland tools. A (one!) specific loadable kernel module can
provide the "low level" access where it is needed.






-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...