[a thing]

Would it be safe for FreeBSD and GNU/Linux to share /home and /usr/local?

[bigtomrodney]

I would imagine sharing /home as long as there are seperate users would be okay, as long as you used a filesystem that both could read (ext3 maybe?). As for sharing /usr/local....I'm not sure. If all of an application was completely contained it may work, but I think it would be more likely to break something else.

[a thing]

The filesystems are ext3.
Why wouldn't the same user be OK?

[the0r3tic]

Originally Posted by a thing

The filesystems are ext3.
Why wouldn't the same user be OK?

I dont think FreeBSD has decent enough read-write support for the ext3 file system.

[sether]

Originally Posted by !=

I dont think FreeBSD has decent enough read-write support for the ext3 file system.

If you mount the partition as ext2 and read-only, you shouldn't have a problem. Writing to an ext2 partition on FreeBSD is not suggested, so I don't know what use a read-only /home would be. The same goes for UFS2 support in Linux.

And a definite no on sharing /usr/local because 1) an executable on Linux cannot be run natively on FreeBSD and a FreeBSD executable cannot be natively run on Linux 2) the FreeBSD and Linux filesystem hierarchies handle what goes in /usr/local differently.

It's best to keep Linux and FreeBSD partitions separate.