USB flash drive support/usage

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Dec 21), Kenneth W Cochran said:
> I have some questions about the little USB flash drives...
> 
> Is there a FAQ or some documentation on them?  So far I haven't
> found much in the Handbook or manpages.  Pointers welcome.  :)
> 
> Do I need any driver(s) besides umass(4) & its required kernel
> options?

Nope.  just what's listed in the EXAMPLES section of the manpage.
 
> Any differences between 4.x and 5.x support for them?

5.x supports more devices, and supports them better :)  There are a
numbers of quirks entries in umass.c for misbehaving devices.
 
> Apparently they come setup for a FAT32 filesystem - can I format them
> for other filesystems (e.g. linux-ext2, BSD UFS/UFS2, MS NTFS) &
> expect them to work reliably?

You can, but FAT32 is definitely the most portable.
 
> Assuming they work (well) with FreeBSD, how do I properly set them up
> for UFS/UFS2?  Do I need to fdisk and {disk,bsd}label first?

Just newfs on /dev/da# should be enough.  You can fdisk or disklabel if
you want, but if you're not going to boot off it I don't think it buys
you anything.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com