# Solid support for any common/native Linux filesystem?



## monkeyboy (May 1, 2014)

I'm thinking of setting up a dual-boot FreeBSD/Linux computing server/machine and it would really help if the two OSs could share one large filesystem for data, user files, etc, in a way that both OSs have full and total support of that filesystem. This obviously rules out NTFS, FAT... is there an obvious choice for a shared filesystem? (Each host can have its own boot/system partition with their "native" FS.)


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## kpa (May 1, 2014)

*Re: Solid support for any common Linux filesystem?*

Ext2 works sort of but the FreeBSD implementation has some serious bugs and there seems to be very little interest in fixing those bugs. Out of all filesystems that are available ZFS is probably the only one at the moment that works well enough on both.

Why can't you run either one of the OSes in a virtual machine on top of the other?


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## fonz (May 1, 2014)

monkeyboy said:
			
		

> is there an obvious choice for a shared filesystem?


Ext2 reportedly works, although I haven't tried it myself lately.


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## monkeyboy (May 2, 2014)

*Re: Solid support for any common Linux filesystem?*



			
				kpa said:
			
		

> Ext2 works sort of but the FreeBSD implementation has some serious bugs and there seems to be very little interest in fixing those bugs. Out of all filesystems that are available ZFS is probably the only one at the moment that works well enough on both.
> 
> Why can't you run either one of the OSes in a virtual machine on top of the other?


ZFS? Both can mount the same ZFS disk pool.

VM: maybe, but would that allow access to the same filesystems? Would running on a Freebsd FreeBSD VM allow Linux to access files on a FreeBSD UFS?


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## kpa (May 2, 2014)

*Re: Solid support for any common Linux filesystem?*



			
				monkeyboy said:
			
		

> kpa said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




ZFS aims to be portable and completely byte-to-byte compatible between different types of systems so yes, ZFS can use the same pool on both systems.

If you go with a VM you can use NFS for example to share the disk on the host side and mount it on the guest side. It's of course not as fast as direct access but as they say, one can't have everything


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## tingo (May 3, 2014)

As long as it isn't a laptop: use network storage. Problem solved.


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