> Is it possible to make the hurd filesystem from FreeBSD? I'd like to > try out the hurd, but I really don't want to install linux first.
There are two answers to this, both of which are "yes, but you will be the first to test it in recent memory". To start with, Mach should grok the FreeBSD partitioning ok, so that should not be an issue however you want to do it. I'm not keeping real close track of GRUB, but last I knew it didn't know about the new-fangled freebsd boot-loader configuration crapola, so you might want to just chainload the freebsd boot loader rather than having GRUB boot your freebsd kernel. I believe current freebsd systems support the ext2fs (Linux) filesystem format. You can either compile e2fsprogs (perhaps it's even in the ports collection, I don't keep track), or maybe run a linux mke2fs binary under freebsd's linux binary emulation, to make a filesystem. If you are doing a tarball install, then I presume you can figure it out from there (i.e. mount the ext2fs filesystem, untar from freebsd, and then pick up the linux-oriented instructions from there). If you want to use cross-install, then you might be able to do that using a dpkg binary under emulation, or compile dpkg yourself for freebsd, but I'm not going to help you figure all that out. The other answer is that the Hurd supports the ufs/ffs (BSD) filesystem too. (It was the Hurd's first filesystem, in fact.) The bad news here is that the ufs filesystem has not gotten nearly as much maintenance and testing as ext2fs in the last couple of years. The format supported by the Hurd's ufs filesystem is compatible with older BSD filesystems, and last I knew it had no problem with FreeBSD filesystems, but I haven't kept track of the BSD changes in some years and there may well be newer ffs format features that the Hurd doesn't fully support. The good news is that the ufs filesystem has not gotten nearly as much maintenance in the last couple of years, and it was fairly stable before I started breaking everything else. Note that running a BSD fsck on a Hurd ufs is a bad scene, unless you really, really know what you are doing (i.e. use fsck without -p and know when to say y, know when to say n, and know when to run).
