On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 03:45:07PM +, dittigas wrote:
On Sun, 2004-01-11 at 06:39, Michael Sternberg wrote:
Hello
What are my options for sharing data between Linux and Win2K on
dual boot computer ? I need read/write access from both OS to a
shared partition, until now I used FAT. Do we have something
better ?
There are Captive's hosted native windows drivers (full r/w) available
for linux. See more info here:
http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modloadname=Newsfile=articlesid=2171
Full read/write yes, but does it really give you that much more than
VFAT? What does one actually want from a filesystem these days?
* Long filenames - mostly all give you. ext2/3 better than vfat (and
better than ntfs, I think) - ext2/3 give you full case sensitivity,
while vfat can't have e.g. both abcd and Abcd, but it's good enough.
* Unix semantics - e.g. soft and hard links (ntfs has only hard (and
I am not sure captive supports them - did anyone check?)), vfat none),
device files (e.g. if you want your / to be on it) - none, etc.
* good performance - I did not check it, but I find it hard to believe
that a native Linux driver won't easily beat an NT driver that goes
through another level (maybe more than one) of emulation.
* reliability - that might be the big point. I guess the captive driver
will eventually, even if not now, be much better than fat, considering
the logging of ntfs.
* security semantics - vfat has none, but so is captive. NTFS does have
a lot of security semantics, and is implemented quite well in NT. For
example, if you have two NT installations on a machine, and you give
some file a permission for a local user of one of them, the other won't
know what to do (and will say the permissions are for an account
unknown). But if both of them belong to the same domain, and you give
permissions to a domain user, both will see it the same. It's true that
in Linux it's even more transparent (some might say better, some worse)
- you can have in two installations the same /etc/passwd files (in
addition to the NT equivalent of being in the same YP or other domain)
and the permissions will be the same. However, captive works the same
as fat - you tell it who the owner of the file system is, what
permissions each and every file on it has (only one - just as fat), and
that's it. The current sad situation is that you can't have a dualboot
machine with any security semantics shared by two OSes. The closest
you can have is read-only (or append-only) ones - iso9660 and udf
(I didn't try using nondefault permissions with either, BTW, and would
love to hear stories).
If you have such needs, the best thing you can do is access it from the
network, through samba/nfs. If that's not an option (it isn't if you
have only one machine), you simply can't have it.
umsdos gives you all of the unix features, but not on Windows. On
Windows, you'll see only variations of the short 8.3 versions of the
names of your files. I used to have my root filesystem on umsdos,
and while it did have problems, and I eventually got rid of it, it did
work quite well.
uvfat was supposed to be umsdos with the vfat long filenames, so that
you would loose nothing by mounting with it, but it's dead.
If uvfat was being developed more intensively, I think it could have
been a good alternative for some uses, but in the current state of
things, I think vfat is the best option. It's simple, it's common,
it's everywhere, supported by virtually every OS in the world (natively,
and also by mtools, if not natively), you can access it from a DOS boot
floppy if you have such weird needs, the Linux driver and dosfstools
are very mature, you need it anyway for things like digital cameras,
and although it's very primitive and featureless, it's here to stay.
--
Didi
BTW Kernel 2.6 has NTFS support for r/w (CONFIG_NTFS_RW). Its seems that
2.6.1 now supports (_safe_) r/w as well, though very restrictive (e.g.
modify only, no change in file length) whice is probably useless unless
for distro's such as TopologyLinux which use a single-file logical disk
on fat/ntfs.
It's mostly the same driver as on linux-ntfs.sf.net. Works well for
things like TopologyLinux (I managed to copy an existing ext3 partition
and boot from it while it's on ntfs, and as I said in another thread
some months ago, this is my intention for our next instaparty), but is
not an option for what the OP asked (keeping files, e.g. /home, shared).
--
Didi
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