Access to BSD slices from Linux

Contents

1. Installation Stuff
2. Kernel Configuration
3. Access the BSD filesystem
4. LILO Configuration

When installing OpenBSD or FreeBSD together with Linux the easiest and painleast way is to create a primary partition under Linux (with fdisk or cfdisk) and set the partition ID to a5 (FreeBSD) or a6 (OpenBSD):

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1        1459    11719386    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            1460        1463       32130   83  Linux
/dev/hda3            1464        1829     2939895   a6  OpenBSD
/dev/hda4            1830        9729    63456750    5  Extended

The installer of FreeBSD finds the partition of type a5 and you can create your slices within this partiton.

If you install OpenBSD, the installer will go straight into OpenBSD's fdisk program. The first screen is very confusing. Type 'print' to get a human readable partition overview. You should see the partition you created under Linux as OpenBSD. You can exit fdisk with or without writing changes to disk. The installer will then go into OpenBSD's disklabel editor. You can create your BSD slices within the existing OpenBSD partition.

2. Kernel Configuration

In order to be able to see your BSD slices under Linux your Linux kernel must be configured for BSD disklabel support:

# make menuconfig

 Partition Types  --->                   
            + +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ + 
            | |     [*] Advanced partition selection                              | | 
            | |     [ ]   Acorn partition support                                 | | 
            | |     [ ]   Alpha OSF partition support                             | | 
            | |     [ ]   Amiga partition table support                           | | 
            | |     [ ]   Atari partition table support                           | | 
            | |     [ ]   Macintosh partition map support                         | | 
            | |     [*]   PC BIOS (MSDOS partition tables) support                | | 
            | |     [*]     BSD disklabel (FreeBSD partition tables) support      | | 
            | |     [ ]     Minix subpartition support                            | | 
            | |     [ ]     Solaris (x86) partition table support                 | | 

And obviously you also need support for BSD's filesystem type ufs.

 Miscellaneous filesystems  ---> 
            + +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ + 
            | |     <M> UFS file system support (read only)                       | | 
            | |     [ ]   UFS file system write support (DANGEROUS)               | | 
            | |     [ ]   UFS debugging                                           | | 

As you see write support is still marked as DANGEROUS.

Access the BSD filesystem

FreeBSD and OpenBSD actually don't use the same filesystem type. If you want to mount your OpenBSD filesystems under Linux put something like

 # OpenBSD
 /dev/hda15       /bsd           ufs     ro,ufstype=44bsd        1   0
 /dev/hda17       /bsd/usr       ufs     ro,ufstype=44bsd        1   0

to Linux' /etc/fstab. For FreeBSD  'ufstype=ufs2'  is used instead of  'ufstype=44bsd' :

 # FreeBSD
 /dev/sda8         /bsd           ufs    ro,ufstype=ufs2         1   0
 /dev/sda10        /bsd/var       ufs    ro,ufstype=ufs2         1   0
 /dev/sda11        /bsd/tmp       ufs    ro,ufstype=ufs2         1   0
 /dev/sda12        /bsd/usr       ufs    ro,ufstype=ufs2         1   0

As mentioned before, write support is still marked as dangerous - to be on the safe side we add the read-only (ro) option.

If you don't know how your BSD slices show up in Linux, first check your fstab under BSD, e.g. for the above example it might look as below:

 BSD# cat /etc/fstab
 # Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
 /dev/ad4s1b             none            swap    sw              0       0
 /dev/ad4s1a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
 /dev/ad4s1e             /tmp            ufs     rw              2       2
 /dev/ad4s1f             /usr            ufs     rw              2       2
 /dev/ad4s1d             /var            ufs     rw              2       2
 /dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0

Back at Linux you check the kernel messages for the BSD disklabel:

 root@tux# dmesg|grep -w bsd
 sda1: <bsd: sda8 sda9 sda10 sda11 sda12 >

The Linux partitions are the same order as the BSD slices: sda8-ad4s1a (/), sda9-ad4s1b (swap), sda10-ad4s1d (/var), sda11-ad4s1e (/tmp), ad4s1f-sda12 (/usr).

LILO Configuration

Under Linux you add a section like

 #
 # BSD
 #
 other=/dev/hda3
   label=BSD

to your /etc/lilo.conf and rerun lilo. The above entry creates a line 'BSD' in LILO's boot menu, that starts BSD's chain loader. This entry is valid for both OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and possibly for other BSDs aswell).