[Wylug-help] Building FreeBSD and NetBSD filesystems on Linux

[John Hodrien]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Dave Fisher wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been messing about with Xen recently and managed to run many
> different distros and OSes in VMs (domains in xen-speak).
>
> Thus far I've had to run the BSDs off disk images, since I've been
> unable to find a convincing way of building UFS and UFS2 filesystems
> using Linux utilities.
>
> I realise that I could use the BSD VMs to build appropriate filesystems,
> but my spare disk space is under LVM and I'm not yet comfortable enough
> with either BSD to risk trashing the volume group.
>
> So does anyone know a simple way of creating UFS and UFS2 slices,
> partitions, and filesystems from Linux?

Having never used Xen I might not be understanding things right but...

If your plan is to create an LV, format that as UFS then use it with Xen I'm
dubious, since I'm not sure how your BSD VM is going to view that disk.

If it can view it merrily, then you could just create the LV and then use BSD
to slap a UFS filesystem on it.  If it can't then I don't see where you go
from here.

It's often quite handy to partition your disk quite heavily and make multiple
PVs part of your VG rather than making a single PV on a disk to avoid problems
like this, as you can simply ditch a PV and make it into a regular partition.

jh

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