# How to create an ext4 partition on FreeBSD



## davidkazuhiro (Dec 15, 2011)

How do I create an ext4 partition on FreeBSD?


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## SirDice (Dec 15, 2011)

You don't. FreeBSD doesn't have ext4 support.


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## pbd (Dec 15, 2011)

SirDice said:
			
		

> You don't. FreeBSD doesn't have ext4 support.



What about the sysutils/e2fsprogs port and its *mkfs.ext4* utility?


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## SirDice (Dec 15, 2011)

Not sure how well it works. I've only seen people having problems accessing ext3 or ext4.

Mounting ext3 shouldn't be a problem but you may have some issues with the inode size. 
Mounting ext4 also shouldn't be a problem if you mount it as ext3 (but you lose the journalling).

But I really don't recommend using anything else but UFS or ZFS.


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## Mage (Dec 16, 2011)

I had serious problems with ext4 on Gentoo linux 2 years ago. Kernel freeze several times while untar. Suspend/resume problems. The same computers had none of these problems with XFS. I would never use ext4 even on linux.


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## fluca1978 (Dec 16, 2011)

Mage said:
			
		

> I had serious problems with ext4 on Gentoo linux 2 years ago. Kernel freeze several times while untar. Suspend/resume problems. The same computers had none of these problems with XFS. I would never use ext4 even on linux.



I use it on production machines and still not get a problem. I know ext3 has different issues, ext4 is much more better. By the way each file system has pros and cons. I would not recommend to use extX partition under FreeBSD unless not strictly necessary. fuse might help, but performances are not good enough for a deep use. This is my opinion, of course.


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## Beeblebrox (Dec 19, 2011)

If you could advise why you want an ext4, we could suggest alternatives.
Are you trying to share a partition (like /home) with your linux distro?
If that's the case look int ZFS - a lot of posts on the forum on how to share with linux. Ext2 is also an option (has r/w) but ZFS is way better.


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## fluca1978 (Dec 19, 2011)

Beeblebrox said:
			
		

> Ext2 is also an option (has r/w) but ZFS is way better.



I could be wrong, but after all Linux has support for ZFS via FUSE, so it is quite slow. I would not recommend using ZFS but it depends on how much is stable ZfsOnLinux.


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## Beeblebrox (Dec 19, 2011)

Using it, no problems on the shared zfs.
Can't comment about performance on server setups, but then again servers don't dual-triple-boot.
Dajhorn ZFS seems to do a better job.


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