On Mon, Dec 16, 2013, at 05:26 PM, Donald Allen wrote: > On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Tekk <t...@parlementum.net> wrote: > > I've got an ext3 /home partition which I use under linux, how likely is > > it that files will get clobbered if I use the same /home under a dual > > boot with openbsd? > > > > Your subject asks about the stability of the ext2 support in OpenBSD, > but your message says you have an ext3 partition you want to access. > ext2 and ext3 are not the same thing -- ext3 is a journaled variant of > ext2 that OpenBSD does not support. See > > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq9.html > > Don't do it.
My understanding is read/write access is considerably more risky than read-only access. If you just need to read that /home under OpenBSD it's much less complicated and less risky as you can just mount /home read-only and be done with it (even if it's still ext3). At minimum, if you insist on read-write, you should get rid of the journal thus converting ext3 back to ext2. It's a Really Bad Idea to mount ext3 as ext2 read-write unless you are extra careful to shut down cleanly every time and even then it's dubious. It *might* be less risky if you format that /home as FFS and access it using the Linux kernel's UFS/FFS module. Or, you could simply keep separate /home for GNU/Linux and OpenBSD, which to me is perhaps the cleanest solution. (I tend to compile a lot of stuff and install it to $HOME/bin when I don't want it cluttering up /usr/local/bin which is something I will admit a lot of users probably don't do.) -- Shawn K. Quinn skqu...@rushpost.com
