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> if I created a ZFS filesystem (along with a pool) from Ubuntu it was creating some of these features that ZFS on FreeBSD didn't properly recognize and didn't allowed me to successfully mount it.

I mean... shrugs ...you could format it as XFS and not be able to mount on FreeBSD either? Seems like feature flags is a good way to solve this problem.



I was actually going to ask that... Is XFS a good "portable" filesystem across GNU/Linux and different BSD flavors? Native support or through FUSE? The use case are USB drives. I don't mind losing visibility on Windows or MacOS, just to work flawlessly between these without major efforts.

Edit: Added some comments.


ZFS is really one of the only games in town AFAIK for serious filesystems. UFS might also work? Of course there is always exFAT, etc.


I could be wrong but I didn't go with UFS because apparently there are significant implementation differences among BSDs. I was kind of surprised to discover that.


FreeBSD and NetBSD essentially derive from the same source, 4.4BSD-Lite from March 1994. OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD from 1995.

There's been a lot of divergence, and there's not really anything pushing towards convergence. FreeBSD modified UFS to meet their needs and desires and other BSDs went in other directions. There wasn't a lot of clammoring for a disk based data format for data interchange, so there's not a big reason to keep the divergent UFSes compatible. Exchange data via networks or tape archives or tars written to block devices or tarfiles on a widely recognized filesystem (msdos fat will do).

This pattern of a shared source and divergent development isn't super common. It's pretty rare commercially, and few opensource projects have forks that diverge and stay active for decades.


As a BSD user I think the divergence is a good thing. it means there are substantial differences which allows you to pick an OS that's really tailored to your usecase.

In the Linux world there's mainly just userland differences. I like it the BSD way. Of course Linux sees much more commercial input which I consider a bad thing and one reason I use FreeBSD so much. But for commercial interests it's a good thing to have as much in common as possible to have more potential customers.


The BSDs support ext2fs in kernel, that should work. FAT would work too of course.




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