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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:1283 comp.os.386bsd.questions:6025 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!crcnis1.unl.edu!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!sunic!isgate!veda.is!adam From: adam@veda.is (Adam David) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: FreeBSD, NetBSD coexist and share filesystem! Message-ID: <CF3w61.6FK@veda.is> Date: 18 Oct 93 18:46:34 GMT References: <CExLov.3At@latcs1.lat.oz.au> <CEy3zt.1Lp@festival.ed.ac.uk> <CEyAos.7Kx@veda.is> <CF3Ho5.Jn2@festival.ed.ac.uk> Organization: Veda Systems, Iceland Lines: 30 richard@castle.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes: [db format] >The format changed between NetBSD 0.8 and 0.9. The symptom is that >programs will be unable to find usernames (ls prints numeric values >instead, emacs can't find ~user, etc). Perhaps one of the NetBSD >people could give a better description of what changed. Yes, the same change was made between pk0.2.4 and FreeBSD. The original question was about whether the same filesystem could be used for both FreeBSD and NetBSD. There is one thing that I forgot to mention last time round that can be an annoying incompatibility for the unsuspecting user. Symbolic links in NetBSD use a previously unused field to mean something, and therefore weird effects can be experienced. I moved from pk0.2.4 to NetBSD 0.9 to FreeBSD, unpacking the tarfiles at each stage using the previous OS version. NetBSD with 386bsd symbolic links caused /usr/bin/cpp to stop working because cpp was a relative symbolic link to gcpp (which was being searched for in the current directory instead of the directory containing the symbolic link). This effect only happened for script files, binary executables pointed to by relative symbolic links (for example /usr/bin/cc -> gcc) still worked fine. Perhaps it was a random effect that made some links fail and not others. FreeBSD worked fine with NetBSD symbolic links. I suspect that the converse would not be true. It is necessary to use NetBSD bootblocks if they are expected to boot both OS versions. -- adam@veda.is