[TriLUG] Where is Linux today?

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 10:24 AM, Wesley Shields <wxs at atarininja.org> wrote:
> I'm still very new to the list, hope nobody minds me somewhat
> hijacking this thread.  I'm looking forward to going to the meetings
> when I arrive in NC in the fall.  ;)

No worries. :-)

> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 10:51:07PM -0400, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
[...]
>> me to tell them what to do (far from it!).  But, I've been dismayed
>> enough times by it that I've seriously thought about moving
>> to FreeBSD.  The main reason I haven't for my desktop
>> (which, admittedly doesn't get used as much as my laptop)
>> is the trouble it would take to move from my XFS filesystem
>> on linux software raid.  If FreeBSD could just read that directly,
>> I probably would have already switched.
>
> I'm biased against Linux in general, so I'll not comment on the above
> except to state that I believe there is read-only support for XFS in
> FreeBSD 7.0.
>
> Quote from xfs(5):
> The xfs file system support first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0.
>
> Wikipedia and other places seem to agree.  I've never used anything
> other than UFS and ZFS (the occasional msdos or ext2 reading) under
> FreeBSD so I have no idea if it will eat your data, light your cat on
> fire or do other generally bad things.
>
> Not that I want to hijack this thread but you may be able to migrate
> away from XFS and onto something more suitable for FreeBSD use if you
> want.  I think backups in case of problems are in order though.
>
> You may also be able to try the live CD and see how it handles your
> hardware.

Yeah, I knew about the read-only XFS support.  That's very cool
and not the main problem.  The main problem is that FreeBSD
doesn't at all support linux software raid.  I've currently got 2
160 GB (they're a few years old, so don't laugh at how small
they are. :-P ) SATA drives in a software RAID 1 configuration.
I've looked all over but FreeBSD definitely doesn't support
reading that.

I did, however, think up a way I could keep all my data and
still move to FreeBSD, but it's just too much of a pain to
do it.  Since it's RAID 1, I could pull out one of the drives and
run the other one in degraded mode while I copied over the
data to the other drive, probably formated as ext3 so as to
better work with freebsd (since I don't know what kind of
bugs are in the freebsd xfs driver).  Then, install freebsd,
and set up whatever their software raid is (don't remember
what's it's called right now) but set it up with one drive
in degraded mode and then copy over the data from the
ext3 temp drive and then add it into the raid array.  Got
all that? :-)  That's not simple and would take way to much
time (reference back to my original premise...)

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
(fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
increscent, all sable.