On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

: newfs -O creates an "old" format ffs filesystem that is close enough
: that fsck under the 1.5.1 installer can convert it without a lot of
: complaints,

The words "convert it" come to mind as a possible stickling point in the
next section:

: but when I go back to MacOS X it no longer recognizes it as "old" and
: won't fsck it without complaining about the directory sizes.

Perhaps MacOS X doesn't like the flavor of 4.4BSD format filesystem that
NetBSD uses?

You *can* use an older 4.3BSD format ffs under NetBSD without converting it;
you just have to avoid doing "fsck -c".  You may lose some things, like
large files (>2GB) and 32-bit uid/gid, but you gain compatibility.  It might
be useful for a home directory partition or somesuch.

There are four levels for the filesystem, too (see NetBSD fsck_ffs(8))--0
through 3.  If MacOS X is happy with levels 1 or 2, you can probably live
with it just fine.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5 now available on CD-ROM  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/