# Good partition for both FreeBSD and Linux



## dagecko (May 29, 2012)

Hello,

I am completly new to the world of FreeBSD. However I use Linux for more than ten years now. I decided to try FreeBSD for some reasons (mainly about network drivers).

I have a computer that runs Linux and that I use for development (3D), doing audio (play and record), and for serving (HTTP/PHP and network share threw Samba for the home network).

I tried FreeBSD this week-end on the same computer and apart how to boot the OS everything went good. The problem arose when I tried to use my Linux partitions under my newly installed OS. Indeed, all my Linux partitions are in XFS. And so I discovered that FreeBSD can only read (in the best, since read might not work or crashed my system depending on the harddrive I tested) this file system. In fact, I was a lot surprised to see that XFS and other common filesystems like EXT4 or even EXT3 are not or only partially supported under FreeBSD.

So my question is simple and might have been asked several times. I would like to know which filesystem do you recomm*e*nd to do the tasks I wrote above? Also, I would like to make the fewest modifications to what I currently have (so I will keep most XFS partitions, and will move some partitions to the one you recomm*e*nd). My wish is to have a good filesystem, journalized, with quick access (so maybe not zfs) and that is 100% supported on both Linux and FreeBSD, in both read and write access and journalization support.

I hope your answers will help me find the good solution, my first glance was to move back to EXT2, but this looks so old to me.

Regards.


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## jb_fvwm2 (May 29, 2012)

You may want to read up on the SUJ features of v9; also the ext3fs (etc) in /usr/ports/sysutils/e2fsprogs... (... programs...)


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## throAU (Jun 1, 2012)

I'm not sure there's an easy answer to this question, the requirements of journal support and speed IMHO rule out most filesystems that both operating systems support due to emulation.  I don't think FreeBSD can support journaled EXT filesystems that need a journal replay without an fsck first.

PC-BSD (essentially FreeBSD as far as filesystem support goes) have a filesystem support table here, which doesn't look good.

You might be able to find UFS read/write support under Linux?  There is a port of ZFS for Linux too, unsure of status - there's definitely one using FUSE, but I don't think it is very quick.


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## funky (Jun 1, 2012)

There is the ZFS on linux project which implements native ZFS support for Linux. On a Ubuntu system it is very simple to install via the PPA. I use this on a Ubuntu + FreeBSD system and it works flawlessly for me. But, needless to say, backup your data.


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