[Libguestfs] guestfs-tools for *BSD images

[Laszlo Ersek]

On 12/09/21 03:28, Yongkui Guo wrote:
> Hi Brady,
> There is a related bug before: Bug 541618
> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=541618> - guestfish not able
> to mount freebsd ufs2 partitions automatically

The last comment on that bug is dated  2013-11-22 at present. With the
justification given by Rich in this very thread (= impossible to tell
apart different things that all claim to be UFS), is it even possible to
fix that bug? Should we close it as CANTFIX?

Thanks
Laszlo

> 
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2021 at 10:26 PM Laszlo Ersek <lersek at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 12/08/21 11:52, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>> On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 12:18:30PM -0600, Brady Pratt wrote:
>>>> [    1.998352] >>>WARNING<<< Wrong ufstype may corrupt your filesystem,
>> default
>>>> is ufstype=old
>>>
>>> The problem is this one and it's not easily resolvable.  UFS isn't a
>>> single filesystem type, it's a clade of filesystems which all evolved
>>> from a common ancestor through the various BSDs, but crucially have
>>> the same magic number (so no way to differentiate them).  For *BSD
>>> itself this isn't a problem since the same OS creates and consumes the
>>> filesystem.
>>
>> (I think it *should* be considered a problem even for the *BSDs; what
>> about moving disks between different BSD versions or flavors?)
>>
>>> But it's a problem for Linux which must be told which
>>> filesystem type to mount - and get it wrong, as you can see above, Bad
>>> Things happen.
>>>
>>> So it's not really possible to resolve this in libguestfs as we don't
>>> know the filesystem type until after we have mounted and inspected it.
>>>
>>> Rich.
>>>
>>
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>