PC-BSD 1.3 beta reviewed

I am going to wipe my Elive 0.5 installation from the second computer and install PC-BSD. I just hope it plays nice with the other two Linux distributions installed on that computer.

What file system does PC-BSD use and can it read Linux filesystems?

Also, is it possible to upgrade PC-BSD to the latest version? Lets say I install 1.2, can I then upgrade it to 1.3?
 
megamaced said:
I am going to wipe my Elive 0.5 installation from the second computer and install PC-BSD. I just hope it plays nice with the other two Linux distributions installed on that computer.

What file system does PC-BSD use and can it read Linux filesystems?

Also, is it possible to upgrade PC-BSD to the latest version? Lets say I install 1.2, can I then upgrade it to 1.3?
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PC-BSD uses UFS and UFS2 file systems (default UFS2) and it has full R/W support for ext2 and ext3 but I'm not sure about other 'alternative' linux file systems.

I think that 1.3 will have an upgrade option built in but there will also be a simple patch that can be downloaded to 'patch' it up to 1.3 without downloading the entire iso. Its like a 'distupgrade'

The nice thing about sharing freeBSD (and PC-BSD) with other OSes on the system is that the entire install can reside on one primary partition. This works really nice. FreeBSD uses disk slices which is like what windows and linux calls a partition and then subdivides that into as many partitions as needed with as many different file systems as you want. These partitions act like logical drives. You can read this for more info. I'll look for something better for info on UFS slices.

----------EDIT-----------
Here it is
 
The file system on the second computer is universally ReiserFS. Do you know if BSD can read Reiser3?

BTW, can Linux read UFS filesystems?

Also, I noticed that the PC-BSD installer includes an option to install the bootloader to the MBR, but not to the boot partition? This is not good for me because I already have an MBR bootloader set up. How would I go about getting the BSD bootloader on the boot partition?
Failing that, how would I configure openSUSE's GRUB (on the MBR) to directly boot the BSD kernel?

Thanks
 
GRUB, lilo and GAG can all boot freeBSD. See here for GRUB instructions. There are many threads about this at the PC-BSD forums.

The freeBSD boot loader can also boot linux, windows and others. Linux does not support UFS, not even read. I don't know why because it is a standard filesystem for many UNIX OSes, like solaris, all BSDs and others. FreeBSD can read reiserFS but I don't know about the stability. This and this are what you will need. It is not in the kernel.

I think linux pulled a microsoft and refused to support UFS for competative reasons.
 
I was wrong about UFS and UFS2 support. Linux does, somewhat, support it but write support is still a bit ratty. It also requires a custom kernel configuration as shown in the gentoo wiki

The reason for bad linux UFS support is that there are not clear standards on UFS. FreeBSD UFS is different than Solaris UFS although compatable.

From the UFS wikipedia entry:
Linux includes a UFS implementation for binary compatibility at the read level with other Unixes, but since there is no standard implementation for the vendor extensions to UFS, Linux does not have full support for writing to UFS. The native Linux ext2 filesystem is inspired by UFS. (In fact, in some 4.4BSD-derived systems, the UFS layer can use an ext2 layer as a container layer, just as it can use FFS and LFS.)
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HTH
 
If you want to flame Linux for not supporting UFS well, answer this: Why doesn't *BSD support Ext3, Reiser3/4, XFS, JFS, or any other good journaled filesystems? Well, AFAIK a major feature of UFS is something called soft-writes, which are basically an alternative for the whole concept behind journaled filesystems. So, it's really more of a behavior issue than a filesystem issue. In actuality, UFS is inferior to journaled filesystems anyway, and softwrites work better in theory than reality. So, it's slower and less reliable than journaled filesystems. Perhaps that's why people are working on getting journaled FS' running on BSD.
 
Anti-Trend said:
If you want to flame Linux for not supporting UFS well, answer this: Why doesn't *BSD support Ext3, Reiser3/4, XFS, JFS, or any other good journaled filesystems? Well, AFAIK a major feature of UFS is something called soft-writes, which are basically an alternative for the whole concept behind journaled filesystems. So, it's really more of a behavior issue than a filesystem issue. In actuality, UFS is inferior to journaled filesystems anyway, and softwrites work better in theory than reality. So, it's slower and less reliable than journaled filesystems. Perhaps that's why people are working on getting journaled FS' running on BSD.
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I don't think that I was flaming linux there. I was actually explaining that linux has poor support BECAUSE of poor standards in UFS. See there, not putting the blame on linux. I would like to now extinguish the fire under my butt. This is PURELY discourse and not a flame fest.

Like I said before, there is read support reiserFS in freeBSD. I have never tried it so I cannot tell you how good it is but it is there if needed.

Yes, you correct in assuming that soft-writes is bsd's answer to journaling. I really don't know enough about it, nor care enough to argue about it. I use UFS for all file systems permanently attached to my system and I haven't had any problems with it. FSCK's *can* take a long time but it is very rarely necessary.
 
kenji san said:
Yes, you correct in assuming that soft-writes is bsd's answer to journaling. I really don't know enough about it, nor care enough to argue about it. I use UFS for all file systems permanently attached to my system and I haven't had any problems with it. FSCK's *can* take a long time but it is very rarely necessary.
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Let me start out by saying that I don't want a flame war, but not misinformation either. Please weigh what you say before you say it. Along that line of thought, I will do my best to take my own advice, and will only speak from my own experience on this matter.

Please don't assume that because I prefer Linux that I don't know BSD. :) What I meant earlier was that as far as I know, the way the BSD kernel interacts with the filesystem has something to do with Linux not supporting UFS fantastically well. So there's more to it than something as simple as a poorly-implemented UFS kernel module,* but a fundamental design issue which keeps UFS in Linux from being perfect. Not to say I don't have my hangups with Linux at all... (WTF Stallman! What is wrong with the wheel group? WTF Ubuntu! What is wrong with running as a non-privileged user...?):P

I work with FreeBSD every single day of the work week. As such, I can say with some assurance that UFS does have its problems, in fact I have seen at least dozens of corrupted UFS filesystems over time. Furthermore, soft-writes do not handle hard power-offs very gracefully, which further compounds the issue. Incidentally they don't handle failing hardware very well either, and when clusters start going bad your data starts getting very corrupt very quickly.

So here's the bottom line: in my hands-on experience, soft-writes is good in theory and fairly poor in reality. BSD is slow to adopt newer concepts because of mostly political hang-ups, and as such they don't support journaling. Ext3, JFS and XFS are good filesystems if you want to read, write and store a lot of data for a long time. UFS is not. In a perfect world it might be, but the world is far from perfect and the conditions far from ideal. If you'd like a real-world example, visit my home web server. The HDD has been bad for months now, and yet the journaled Ext3 filesystem, not available on BSD, has been able to keep it afloat with no data corruption this whole time. In all likeliness it may be able to do so until I can acquire a replacement drive. This would not be possible on UFS.

*UFS support in Linux is actually fairly good, but I don't know anybody who runs it on a Linux system as the primary FS.
 
megamaced said:
C'mon guys, at least we aren't running NTFS :D
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Yes, you're right, megamaced. :) And in fact, this is true in more senses than one. NTFS is far inferior for data retention than UFS with softwrites, despite it's problems. And there are fringe BSD groups who do not agree with allowing *BSD to stagnate by not leveraging newer advances to the *nix base. Take for example, The DragonFly BSD Project...
 
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