OS X/FreeBSD shared zfs partition

[John Hendy]

Hi,

I dual boot OS X and FreeBSD (currently 7.0-i386) and have wanted to share a
partition for storage between the two. I looked into getting HFS+ to work on
FreeBSD (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1198)<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1198>
but
did not succeed. Then I ran across these two pages:

- http://blog.igorminar.com/2009/01/using-zfs-with-mac-os-x-105.html
- http://zfs.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

I used them to successfully change my Users folder in OS X to a zfs
filesystem on a partition separate from my main OS X system/boot files. Now
I just want to mount that partition from FreeBSD. Is this possible? I can
see the slice in /dev as ad5s3, but there's no partitions on that slice to
mount (ad5s3a, for example), nor am I familiar enough with ZFS to know what
it should look like from FreeBSD. I have tried 'mount -t zfs /dev/ad5s3
/media/temp' without success. zfs.ko is loaded (seen in kldstat) and gives
the usual message of it being experimental and being version 6.0. In a post
on the forums (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1613) it was
suggested that I try 'zpool list' but that returned 'no pools available'. I
tried 'zfs list' as well and got 'no datasets available'.

My GUID partition table (OS X) and MBR (FreeBSD) are synced, so they both
show disk0s3 (OS X)/partition 3 as type Solaris (It's 'Solaris Usr' on the
GPT and type B4 iirc on the MBR). I used an EFI booting program called rEFIt
to sync the tables - could the MBR type of the slice be the reason I can't
mount it from FreeBSD?

I've searched long and hard for any posts about using zfs as a way to share
a partition between any two OSs, but have not found any references on how to
use a zfs slice as a shared data partition. Can it only be mounted from the
OS in which it was created? Any thoughts on what I might do here?


Thanks much,
John