On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 09:52:58PM -0500, Roland McGrath wrote: > > Is it possible to make the hurd filesystem from FreeBSD? I'd like to > > try out the hurd, but I really don't want to install linux first. > [...snip...] > > The other answer is that the Hurd supports the ufs/ffs (BSD) filesystem > too. (It was the Hurd's first filesystem, in fact.) The bad news here is > that the ufs filesystem has not gotten nearly as much maintenance and > testing as ext2fs in the last couple of years. The format supported by the > Hurd's ufs filesystem is compatible with older BSD filesystems, and last I > knew it had no problem with FreeBSD filesystems, but I haven't kept track > of the BSD changes in some years and there may well be newer ffs format > features that the Hurd doesn't fully support. The good news is that the > ufs filesystem has not gotten nearly as much maintenance in the last couple > of years, and it was fairly stable before I started breaking everything > else. Note that running a BSD fsck on a Hurd ufs is a bad scene, unless > you really, really know what you are doing (i.e. use fsck without -p and > know when to say y, know when to say n, and know when to run).
I tried once to install Hurd on a UFS partition, but since I didn't have FreeBSD installed I had to use one of the rescue disks from the 3.0 distribution to make the partition. I was able to unpack the tarball on it, and GRUB was able to boot the gnumach from it. However the ufs.static server failed to recognise the partition. It's possible that I have not created the right type of a UFS partition or that the format was too new. If you can by all means try installing it on a UFS partition (choosing an older format would be best), and maybe report about the stability of the filesystem server. Igor