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Date:      07 Aug 2002 12:18:59 +0200
From:      Ketanu <ketanu@wanadoo.fr>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Sharing file ystems with Linux (Debian)
Message-ID:  <87y9bjynsc.fsf@ketanu.dyndns.org>

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The share of partitions was already (many times, as shown by search engines)
discussed, either in mailing lists or in some papers (like the Freebsd Linux
HOWTO). 


*1/Can'get no satisfaction*
After little investigation and experimentation, it seems that the only
filesystem both readable and writable for the two oses (OS's ?) are
msdos/vfat, samba and NFS, with the inconvenient the latters are for
networking, and the former do not support attributes nor owner, nor symbolic
links for the files. Thanks to tar msdos filesystems can be used as
`transaction space' for the two oses, but is unsuitable to be used as a
`true' filesystem.

*2/But, why ?*
Although ext2fs and BSD flavour of ufs are both supported by opensource
software (the Linux Kernel, i.e. Linux,  and the FreeBSD one), there is no
support allowing full read/write access for the `non standard file system'
within each kernel. Wondering why, i could read somewhere, the reason was,
more or less, that abstraction used to describe the file systems on each
kernels was not easy to coerce to the other one.

*3/Circumvent the trouble (and question)*
The lake of filesystem type that shares good between may be annoying, so wa
may try to circumvent it. 

Since it seems hard to enable full support for (e.g.) ext2fs in the FreeBSD
kernel, it may be good to push the problem outside the kernel.

Here is the idea (and the question): could we develop a software that would
export a given ext2fs as Network File System on the local loopback, to allow
the kernel access this filesystem via the NFS interface.

I was told of a software based on this idea, called ext2anywhere, that is in
fact, ext2 under windows, but works good (as far as i was told).

Since my science on kernels and filesystems is rather thin (true OCB!), it
would be fine if someone more clever on this gave advice on this. With such
a NFS server for accessing ext2fs, we will meet concurrence problemes over
the slice/partition presenting the filesystem, but it could be useful and
maybe easier to develop than kernel-inside support.
-- 
Ketanu <ketanu@wanadoo.fr>  - RSA PGP Key ID: 0x20D90C12

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