Accessing UFS partitions from a Macbook

[Felix Friedlander]

>> Considering how BSD-ish it seems in Terminal - df, du and other commands
>> working as expected - I was a bit surprised that it doesn't support UFS
>> natively, given its heritage.  When I first ran mount it complained - as
>> will FreeBSD without an fstab entry - about needing the -t switch, but
>> 'mount -t ufs' didn't complain about that but a (not) missing directory.
> 
> There might be differences resulting in incompatibility between the versions of UFS in various BSDs, and Mac OS main filesystem is HFS+.
> 
> I noticed, after downloading DragonFlyBSD installation image, dd'ing to USB stick, and booting, it could read GPT partition table but was unable to mount any FreeBSD and NetBSD partitions.
> 
> Last DragonFlyBSD image I downloaded and dd'ed to USB stick didn't even get through the boot.
> 
> FreeBSD and NetBSD were unable to mount the DragonFly USB-stick partition.
> 
> There is also the issue of BSD disklabels when using MBR, and one BSD not being able to read the other's disklabel.

OS X did originally support UFS1 (in Disk Utility as well as on the command line), but it dropped that support many versions ago. UFS2, the normal version for FreeBSD, was (AFAIK) never supported.

Fun fact: OS X also had undocumented, partial support for ZFS at one stage, but it was dropped - presumably because of a legal dispute with Oracle.

-- 
Felix Friedlander <felixphew0 at gmail.com>