Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 12:51:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Sharing a partition between Solaris & FreeBSD.. Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960527124018.10288C-100000@covina.lightside.com>
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It looks like it's practical, based on experiments I performed with Zip disks, to format a HD partition (or Zip disk) with a 4.3BSD file system, and share it between FreeBSD and Solaris x86. Unfortunately, both OS's use different (incompatible) "slicing" mechanisms to put several partitions in one FDISK partition, but if you limit things to one UFS partition per filesystem, it should work, using the following /dev names: FreeBSD: /dev/sd?c /dev/sd?s?c - If you have multiple FDISK partitions on that disk Solaris: /dev/dsk/c?t?d?p? - c=controller, t=SCSI target, d=LUN, p=FDISK partition Remember, only one filesystem per FDISK partition, and you must newfs the disk with "-O" to format for 4.2/4.3BSD (or else Solaris will assume it is 4.3BSD, and corrupt it so FreeBSD can't read it correctly). Also, it seems that both OS's will need to fsck the partition to fix the summary information to their liking. Here is my plan, then. I have a 1GB SCSI disk shared between FreeBSD and Solaris. There is a lot of wasted space because neither OS can access the partitions for the other OS. Here is my plan to repartition: 1) Small FreeBSD partition just big enough for /, /usr, and /usr/X11R6. 2) Small Solaris partition just big enough for /, /usr, and OpenWindows. 3) Shared FDISK partition for swap space (32MB) 4) Shared UFS partition for home directories, /usr/freebsd.local, /usr/solaris.local, /usr/share (shared between both), /usr/src and /usr/obj for FreeBSD make worlds, and /var/mail. This way, I will have access to my home directory and mail from either OS, stuff like Emacs LISP files, man pages, and swap space are shared, and if either OS needs some amount of temporary space (e.g. /usr/obj during a make world) it is available. I don't think I'll have time to implement this today (since it will involve backing everything up, including the OS itself since I am using FreeBSD-current), so if anyone sees any problems with this scheme, or has some suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! ---Jake
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