I'm looking for a secure ext driver for linux which works great on Freebsd

ZioMario

ZioMario

Hello. Since I have a lot of disks partitioned and formatted with the ext4 fs,I'm looking for a working ext driver that can I use on Freebsd that gives to me read and write access to those disks. I've found the fuse-ext2 from the ports,but here :

github.com

GitHub - alperakcan/fuse-ext2: Fuse-ext2 is a multi OS FUSE module to mount ext2, ext3 and ext4 file system devices and/or images with read write support.

Fuse-ext2 is a multi OS FUSE module to mount ext2, ext3 and ext4 file system devices and/or images with read write support. - alperakcan/fuse-ext2
github.com github.com

I can read :

Even though write support is available, please do not mount your filesystems with write support unless you have nothing to lose

So,this product is not yet mature ? what tool do u use ?
 
Read is always safe. The fuse user-mode driver works but is a bit slow.
Note freebsd can also read-write xfs and fat32 and ntfs partitions.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Too share data between linux and freebsd i just tar.xz my data and put in on a fat32 partition.
Click to expand...
I've done that before too. It's a good way to go, but then, when I boot Windows 10, it always wants to take ownership of any ntfs or fat32 partitions I create, so I've gone over to using this method instead. I should probably just delete Windows 10, but I still use it once a year or so, to print out tax forms on my Epson printer, and for MagicJack whenever I need a fax line.
 
My epson scanner works fine with FreeBSD. For governemental login it works with a gsm login app to aknowledge my identity. So I can do all tax stuff with FreeBSD.
 
ziomario said:
Even though write support is available, please do not mount your filesystems with write support unless you have nothing to lose

So,this product is not yet mature ? what tool do u use ?
Click to expand...
If you want the full-featured and most reliable file system implementation for a Linux file system, use Linux. Such implementations on other OSes are all "bad" copies. By "bad" I mean that they will be risky to use, in particular when writing to disk. There are very few file systems that can really be shared between OSes (because they use the same implementation on multiple systems, or because the underlying file system is so well known that it can be implemented risk- and bug-free), and in the open source world I think they are OpenZFS, FAT, and the CD/DVD file systems (which are standardized). There are quite a few commercial file systems that can be compatibly used from multiple OSes.

My suggestion would be to run a small VM or a small server with Linux.
 
ziomario said:
Which ones are they ?
Click to expand...
Incomplete list from memory:

CXFS (Silicon Graphics, someone bought it when they went under, but I don't know whether it's still sold)
Panasas
Pivot3 (no longer marketed as a file system, now an embedded component owned by Quantum)
PolyServe (no longer sold, I think)
QFS (Sun, now Oracle)
SAN FileSystem (a.k.a. IBM StorageTank, no longer sold but merged into other products)
Spectrum Scale (a.k.a. IBM GPFS)
StorNext (was also marketed by Apple as Xsan, don't know whether still sold)
Veritas Cluster
??? (I know HP sells one, but I don't know its name)

Nearly all of the above had a way to access them from Linux, and typically also from the proprietary Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Irix, whatever Sun's OS is called this week), and often also Windows and Mac.

A lot of the products listed above may no longer be sold to new customers, but are often supported by vendors for a decade or more after the last sale.

There are probably lots of others that I'm not aware of, or that I forgot.

Some of the nominally open source storage systems (such as Ceph or Lustre) are hardly ever used in large production without getting a big support contract from the authors (Inktank now a division of RedHat/IBM, and whoever owns Peter Braam's company, a while ago it was in Xyratex -> Seagate, but I lost track of it). So it's not clear whether one wants to count them as commercial/proprietary or not.
 
I would be tempted to re-think the question.

In the long term you don't really want to be supporting "foreign" file systems. e.g. even if you can read and write EXT4, you may eventually need to repair ( fsck) EXT4. Not sure what FreeBSD offers there, or how much grief you would suffer if you ever needed to do it.

If I had a number of EXT4 formatted disks, I would acquire enough spare disk capacity to copy them from a native Linux host to a native FreeBSD host across the network using rsync(1). You could do this incrementally with just one spare large disk.

If I really cared about the ability to return the data to Linux at any subsequent date, I would use ZFS as the target file system, as OpenZFS is going to converge on both Linux and FreeBSD and it has the ability to export file systems.
 
I've actually encountered this issue on, needing to run fsck on an EXT3/4 partition. Frankly it was more of an issue, that I had a power loss and the partition got marked as dirty/bad and it wouldn't mount without having a fsck run over it first. In the end, I had to rip that drive from the system and put it in an external drive bay, so I can plug it in my other system that had a linux system working. Eventually, I'd like to transfer the contents to an ZFS volume so that I can share that data again (while being able to back it up properly).
 
what about to create a small (bhyve or virtualbox) linux vm and give to them the physical disk to repair with the linux version of fsck ? it could be valid even using the dd version of linux ? because I've realized that the freebsd version of dd is much slower than the linux version. Is bhyve enough secure when we give to it a physical disk instead of a virtual disk ? does virtualbox supports the assignement of a physical disk ? is it more secure than bhyve ?
 
With bhyve you can also use virtio-9p to share a host directory with a Linux guest. For example, add something like the following to the bhyve command line:
-s 8,virtio-9p,sharename=<host-dir-path>


In the guest you need something like
mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,rw sharename /mnt


With this, dd on a large file (once cached) achieves about 5.2GB/s on the host and 227MB/s on the guest.
 
FYI, ext2fs() works pretty well, and as far I've had to use it, sysutils/e2fsprogs worked well fixing issues with the file system, of course I don't know if there's some bugs that can prevent you to fix something really bad, but it worked in all of my use case scenarios. I never had a situation that these two tools was unable to give me access or unable to fix external drives under ext3 and ext4.
 
Menelkir said:
FYI, ext2fs() works pretty well, and as far I've had to use it, sysutils/e2fsprogs worked well fixing issues with the file system, of course I don't know if there's some bugs that can prevent you to fix something really bad, but it worked in all of my use case scenarios. I never had a situation that these two tools was unable to give me access or unable to fix external drives under ext3 and ext4.
Click to expand...

If I don't remember bad,ext2fs doesnt have the write support. Or if it supports it,it is not encouraged. So,without it,how can the errors be fixed with fsck ?
 
bakul said:
With bhyve you can also use virtio-9p to share a host directory with a Linux guest. For example, add something like the following to the bhyve command line:
-s 8,virtio-9p,sharename=<host-dir-path>


In the guest you need something like
mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,rw sharename /mnt


With this, dd on a large file (once cached) achieves about 5.2GB/s on the host and 227MB/s on the guest.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that bhyve is enough bug free with the assignement of phisycal disks. Some time ago I've assigned a sata disk (where I had installed netbsd) and the disk where I'd installed freebsd has been damaged. But not the disk where I'd installed netbsd. This is how I'd attached the physical disk :

Code: 
bhyve -S -c 8 -m 8G -w -H \
    -s 0,hostbridge \
    -s 1,virtio-blk,/dev/ada1 \
    -s 6,virtio-net,tap0 \
    -s 29,fbuf,tcp=0.0.0.0:5900,w=1440,h=900 \
    -s 30,xhci,tablet \
    -s 31,lpc -l com1,/dev/nmdm1A \
    -l bootrom,/usr/local/share/uefi-firmware/BHYVE_UEFI.fd \
    vm0

you can read what happened reading this post : https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...try-to-boot-freebsd-in-multi-user-mode.82215/
 
ziomario said:
If I don't remember bad,ext2fs doesnt have the write support. Or if it supports it,it is not encouraged. So,without it,how can the errors be fixed with fsck ?
Click to expand...
Nope, ext2fs have write support, and actually the performance is really good to both read and write. As far as I know, journaling isn't supported so be cautious.
 
Menelkir said:
Nope, ext2fs have write support, and actually the performance is really good to both read and write. As far as I know, journaling isn't supported so be cautious.
Click to expand...
If ziomario had only read this very thread, that he himself started, he would already know these answers, and wouldn't have to ask repeatedly. I'm pretty well convinced he's just trolling us for his own amusement.
 
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