Thanks for throwing cold water on my interest in ever installing a BSD again.

I had banished FAT32 from my system long ago and I will never go back to it again.

Actually, I have almost a terabyte of space and only about 80GB is actually formatted in ntfs (just enough for my windows 7 install). The rest is ext4.

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Wait a second though, if Linux and *BSD both have such great implementations of FAT32, a closed standard, wouldn't it be easier for them to actually write implementations of each others filesystems? Incompatible licenses aside, couldn't they rewrite things so the licenses don't affect it? I say this as a person with only a very general understanding of the quite huge differences between the licenses. Also, not being a programmer maybe I am asking for the moon.

Its possible that there is just no interest in this either I guess. It seems it has always been more important to cater to users trying to migrate from Windows.

From the latest FreeBSD's Quarterly Status Report, they are working on ext4 read-only support:
http://freebsd.org/news/status/repor...4-2010-06.html

More about the project here:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/SOC2010ZhengLiu

It's good news. Thanks for the update.

Why nobody says a word about Sun's ZFS (well, now it's Oracle) as 'sharing' FS?
It's excellently supported in both Linux in FreeBSD through FUSE. Well, It's not native in neither OS, but that doesn't matter too much as long as solves the problem. You're not going to use it as FS for "/" (root FS), right? Though, I did read some guys telling that they installed a Linux distro on a ZFS, bot this degenerates in an offtopic,

ZFS is actually supported by the FreeBSD kernel (including ZFS boot) so doesn't require a userland component like fuse.
A native port to linux is also being developed, although still unusable to access a ZFS filesystem: http://zfsonlinux.org/

That's an additional argument for ZFS. Sorry for the small desinformation regarding how FreeBSD support ZFS. I only used FreeBSD for a couple of days ~1.5 years back (left it because of a kernel freeze when accessing an Ext3-mounted-as-Ext2 partition), but I do remember mounting the ZFS partition in both OSes.

The BSDs takes on GPL vary from "GPL? We're less inclined than the Linuxes to use it" to "GPL?!?! Die, you gravy-sucking pig!!!". OpenBSD's leadership has made it clear that GPL will never be in their kernel.

ZFS licensing is also unacceptable, although some of them slaver over the features. But unless Oracle frees up the license it will not be happening in that project.

I know I'm late to the party, but a few points incase anyone else stumbles across this when Googling (like I had).

1. FAT32 is not a Windows file system. It's not even an MS file system. MS just have patents on a few specific FAT32 extensions (such as journaling) which are unlikely to be supported in Linux/BSD anyway.

2. ZFS is not a good 'sharing' file system as it's expected to be only running on one host OS. Hence the "export" tool which is run against ZFS pools before the disks are migrated from one OS to another for import.

3. reiserfs is supported on both FreeBSD and Linux and would make a better alternative for those who (understandably) don't want to use FAT32. NTFS is also supported (rw access too) on both FreeBSD and Linux, if you're happy to use MS tech instead of open source.

4. the ports will naturally only have OSS, given the fact that the ports are a source code repository. If you want closed source software then you need a binary repository instead.

Microsoft developed FAT and introduced it with Windows 95 so FAT32 is clearly a Windows file system, albeit obviously not a windows only file system given its wide support on non MS OSes.ZFS has no particular problem being used by more than one OS (outside zpool and zfs versions compatibility). The export/import feature is there just to make sure the same pool isn't used at the same time by more than one OS.

FAT existed a very long before Windows 95 was ever released. In fact it was used on DOS systems long before MS-DOS Executive (aka Windows 1), let alone Windows 95. Granted FAT32 was released for Win95, but FAT32 is just FAT with 28 bits instead of 8, 12 or 16bits (in fact ironically FAT32 supports less features than FAT16 -eg transparent compression and file permissions- but AFAIK that's due DR-DOS features rather than anything FAT natively supported)

I could have sworn that FAT harped from a CP/M file system that MS adapted, but after a quick Google it seems I was wrong about that and that FAT was originally an MS development for Microsoft BASIC (unlike MS-DOS which was a CP/M-like OS that MS bought from SCP) albeit under one of Microsoft BASICS's many aliases.


That's what I said though. In fact not exactly as you completely ignored the point that having to export/import every shutdown and start up would get pretty tedious pretty quickly.

I'm one of the biggest ZFS fanboys out there (I personally have a ZFS array sat on my FreeBSD home server), however every tool has it's place and ZFS is not the best tool for cross-platform file system sharing.

Indeed, I actually meant FAT32 here. All FAT releases were developed by Microsoft. CP/M wasn't providing a file system standard. Every vendor was implementing it its own way so there was no compatibility between different hardware, end even between machines from a single vendor. Both CP/M file systems and FAT12 were very limited and missing basic features like (sub)directories.
There is a simple workaround in such case. I'm sharing a ZFS pool between a OpenSolaris/Solaris 11 Express/Ubuntu/OEL multi-boot laptop. I have configured them to share the same hostid as I'm sure they won't run concurrently. The shared pool is automatically imported with no issue. I also have ZFS pools on external USB disks and thumbdrives and do not find the "import -f" command that tedious.
Given its strengths, I would recommend ZFS for almost anything, as long as it is supported by the target OSes.

Reiserfs has the other small disadvantage that the developer began serving a sentence of 15-to-life in 2008, so updates will be slow.

@girarde

Reiser itself did not wrote any FreeBSD code to support reiserfs, so I do not see Your point here

I'm sorry, but that doesn't sit comfortably with me. It strikes me as a very dangerous practice on a live system. I certainly wouldn't recommend that for other people.

(The only way I'd ever suggest such a process is if someone built an init script to import ZFS volumes (thus export them on shutdown as well).)
That's a different ball game altogether as you'd have to manually mount the drives anyway. Hardly the same as having to remount an internal drive which you know you'll be using each session (and remembering to manually unmount it before shutdown)

Well I'm sorry but then that makes you narrow minded. There's no such thing as a perfect solution for everything - not even ZFS achieves this.

As I said before, I love ZFS, but even I'm aware that there are some scenarios that it's not ideal for and this is one of them. If you want a shared ZFS volume then do what I did and build a cheap homebrew NAS.


As opposed to FAT32 which, aside a few patent encumbered updates, hasn't much evolved in 15 years?!

Not that any of that matters as ReiserFS ceased development long before Reiser went to jail. In fact, he was working on ReiserFS2 when the sentence was issued. Besides, he wouldn't be writing the BSD updates anyway.