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38d

Overview of file systems on #OpenBSD and #NetBSD and mutual accessibility.

FFS (in kernel)
OpenBSD - v1+2, no journaling, no softdeps, OpenBSD does not recognized NetBSD's FFS
NetBSD - v1+2+2ea, has journaling, no softdeps, recognizes OpenBSD's FFS (but can mount only in ro mode)

Ext2/3/4 (in kernel)
OpenBSD - can create and mount ext2 in rw mode, ext3/4 mounted in ro mode (ext4 has to be 32bit)
NetBSD - same as above

FAT32 (in kernel)
OpenBSD - works flawlessly, file size limit: 4GB - 1B
NetBSD - ditto

ZFS (in kernel)
OpenBSD - no
NetBSD - yes, allows for root on ZFS if boot partition is FFS

NTFS (in kernel)
OpenBSD - mounts in ro mode, works well
NetBSD - theoretically allows for ro mounting, but I was not able to achieve that :(
See ntfs-3g for rw mounting

Honorable mention - exFA(r)T (as FUSE) - can be recognized as NTFS, use mount.exfat, slow

Update: UDF (in kernel)
OpenBSD - does not mount UDF partition due to: "mount_udf: mount: Invalid argument"
NetBSD - reads and writes, transfer is mediocre, needs doing too many hoops than using FAT32
udfclient from ports does not recognize UDF partition...

Wanna transfer data from OpenBSD to NetBSD? Mount FFS in ro mode and siphon data off.
Wanna transfer data from NetBSD to OpenBSD? newfs_msdos is the answer or use exFAT/NTFS+ntfs-3g if you are patient.

Minor tip for those using FAT32 - command split(1) allows to cut tar archives into smaller parts which can be placed onto FAT partition. To merge them, use cat(1).

You probably know all that stuff.

Edited 7d ago

2 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

6d

More #NetBSD thoughts:

I'm an #i3wm / #sway or #KDE #Plasma guy. I tried #OpenBSD's default wm for about a minute, but it was just too jarring for me. I also used #cwm for a while, and it's actually nicely configurable, but I eventually reverted to i3 on OpenBSD. I haven't tried Sway yet, but #Wayland's supposedly working in "Fish Linux" now. ;)

But #ctwm? Look, it's pretty ancient, and it's not a totally perfect fit for my worfklow, but I'm actually kinda diggin' it!

It's also probably the most attractive default GUI of any of the BSDs, considering that obsd gives you a pretty loud bright red or bright blue titlebar motif-looking thing (not knocking motif, just the primary color choice), and #FreeBSD gives you (checks notes) no GUI by default. XD

ctwm isn't quite as flexible as i3/sway, but it's just configurable enough to keep me coming back and tinkering away at it. The way the warpring function (alt+tab, in other words) works is pretty obtuse (only moving forward or backward in the window list, never re-ordering based on recency), but once I learned how to exclude windows (X11 classes or window titles) from the warpring, it became a ton more usable.

I also figured out how to enable active titlebar highlight (it drives me nuts when that's disabled or very subtle, how do you even not understand that basic tenet of usability?) and even how to assign an xpm image to the titlebar so it looks pretty.

Fun stuff!

I should post another screenshot. ;)