Linux on the Mac — state of the union [LWN.net]

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 2, 2016 5:53 UTC (Fri) by imgx64 (guest, #78590)
Parent article: Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Instead of ZFS, how about UDF? I format my flash disks and external HDDs with UDF so I can use them on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's the only filesystem I found to work (read AND write) out of the box on all three OSs.

I don't know how well it would work for /home/, but you could create a UDF partition and use it to move files between Linux and macOS.

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Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 10, 2016 9:14 UTC (Sat) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link] (2 responses)

In the last few years exFAT has been a good choice too.

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 10, 2016 10:22 UTC (Sat) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

> In the last few years exFAT has been a good choice too.

Choice, yes. Good? No. There is no mainline kernel implementation of exFAT. There is a FUSE implementation, and maybe some non-mainline in-kernel implementations.

The reason exFAT is a second class citizen on Linux is that Microsoft asserts many patents on exFAT, and implementing support for it requires a license from Microsoft.

UDF also supports POSIX file system permissions.

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 10, 2016 10:59 UTC (Sat) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

s/maybe/are/ some non-mainline in-kernel implementations like [1].

1. https://github.com/dorimanx/exfat-nofuse

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 12, 2016 12:39 UTC (Mon) by ismail (subscriber, #11404) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you format your drives? Whenever I try to format a usb disk with UDF, windows (8,10) complains that it's unformatted.

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 12, 2016 12:51 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

I recall reading somewhere that Windows will only recongize a UDF filesystem if it's on the first partition on a USB disk, and Mac OS only recognizes it if the whole disk is itself formatted with UDF.

Linux on the Mac — state of the union

Posted Dec 12, 2016 15:07 UTC (Mon) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

This is a problem if you want to use the same disk on Windows, OS/X and Linux. There is an ugly hack to make the disk usable on all three systems: create the file system on the whole disk, then write a partition table with a partition that starts at sector 0. The UDF file system leaves some space unused at the start of the container it is in (disk or partition), which can be used for the MBR containing the partition table. This way the UDF file system appears to be both on the whole disk and in the first partition.

I found this solution on a blog a long time ago, and haven't tried it recently so I don't know if it still works. Even without the trick, the UDF disk should be portable between Linux and one of Windows (partitioned) and Mac (whole disk).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130313095817/http://sipa.ul...