I have just got the linux xfs 2.6 kernel from oss.sgi.com by cvs. I am going to install it alongside my present Mandrake kernel. Now, the Mandrake 2.6.3-13 kernel says it has xfs support, but I could never get it to read a FreeBSD primary partition. So, perhaps it'll read a FreeBSD partition after this install. Since I installed Mandrake as an ext3 system, will an xfs kernel mess up the file structure?

I sure wish FreeBSD would support my usb mouse; then I would use FreeBSD all of the time on my desktop. I tried everything including adding and my usb wheelmouse just won't work in FreeBSD.

FreeBSD as far as I know doesn't use XFS it uses UFS. Linux /can/ apparently read and write this (never used personally). If the option is turned on in the kernel. Writing is marked experimental (and dangerous) however.

An XFS kernel should not mess up your file structure. If it doesn't have ext3 support as well it won't read your hard disk (although ext2 support + editing /etc/fstab will also work.)

I thought UFS was a type of XFS. I turned BSD support on in the my regular ext3 kernel in 2 places for FreeBSD, and it still would not mount the FreeBSD primary partition. Are you sure xfs is experimental? I was under the impression that XFS was a good established file system by IBM that was better than ext3.

Anyhow, my new XFS 2.6 kernel did not work. It gave a kernel panic and an error about unsupported options in the kernel. Has anyone had any luck with the kernels over at http://oss.sgi.com??