# Sharing a filesystem between FreeBSD and OS X



## irkkaaja (Mar 8, 2011)

Yeah, I know a lot of people try to do this and get burned. Please do bore me with the details.

I want to share a partition between OS X and FreeBSD. Specifically, I've got this MacBook, and I want to share one of the partitions on the main SATA drive as storage for torrents. This means lots of writes and reads from both operating systems, but I don't have to worry about randomly disconnecting it, and I don't have to worry about the fact that USB drives are compulsive liars and can break things for no reason.

What I do know is:

OS X UFS _maybe_ works under FreeBSD. This is one thing I really don't know: can FreeBSD mount and use an OS X UFS partition without worrying about a whole lot of weird stuff going on? I've heard reports of people mounting OS X UFS drives under FreeBSD and having it work okay.

FreeBSD UFS2 does _not_ work under OS X. This seems to be an intractable problem.

FreeBSD ZFS and Mac ZFS are at what stage again? As far as I can tell ZFS seems pretty stable on FreeBSD, and Mac ZFS is at least well-maintained. I'm guessing these are interoperable, simply because ZFS makes a lot more rules about the file structure and so it's harder to come up with totally different versions of ZFS the way it is with UFS. I've also heard of people sharing ZFS drives between OS X and Solaris, so I've got a good feeling about this, even though the guy in that thread obviously had some problems!

NTFS just plain does not work as a torrent storage directory on FreeBSD, even under FUSE. Totally out of the question, at least until we steal Darwin's NTFS implementation for FreeBSD 9.


----------



## SirDice (Mar 8, 2011)

The easiest to use is probably also the worst; FAT32.


----------



## dusty (Mar 8, 2011)

As far, as I can understand, both operating systems reside on the same machine? Mac OS X uses HFS+, which support in FreeBSD is purely experimental.


----------



## irkkaaja (Mar 8, 2011)

Oh, yeah, neither system would actually be _installed_ on the shared partition, but it would be on the same machine (and drive) as both systems, yes.



> The easiest to use is probably also the worst; FAT32.


Ew.


----------



## bestwc (Mar 9, 2011)

Install FreeBSD on a Mac, for what particular reason? I would rather use Vmware.


----------



## SirDice (Mar 9, 2011)

irkkaaja said:
			
		

> Ew.


Yes, but it's the only filesystem that's fully supported by both OS-X and FreeBSD.


----------



## nakal (Mar 9, 2011)

Hmm? I thought that OS X has full support for UFS.

Edit: hmm... after reading forums and mailing list,... how to say it softly... I see that Apple is not very good at programming. *facepalm*


----------



## SirDice (Mar 9, 2011)

nakal said:
			
		

> Hmm? I thought that OS X has full support for UFS.



Not really. I recently tried to access a FreeBSD UFS external harddisk on my Macbook Pro. Didn't work. The filesystem simply isn't recognized.


----------



## irkkaaja (Mar 9, 2011)

The replies here seem encouraging:

http://groups.google.com/group/zfs-macos/browse_thread/thread/c8bf149188d71080

I will probably go with ZFS! That is good. The only problem is that it will be hard to deal with Sigur Ros albums and all the weird characters that go into the filenames.



			
				bestwc said:
			
		

> Install FreeBSD on a Mac, for what particular reason? I would rather use Vmware.



Uh, because I want to use both operating systems, and I run pretty taxing stuff on both of them?

"How do I solve this problem?"

"Why would you ever want to solve this problem?"

Doesn't do me any good.


----------



## nORKy (Mar 9, 2011)

I have a FreeBSD server with afpd daemon + avahi (bonjour discovery). It works fine.


----------

