*BSD News Article 96723


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From: "Patrick M. Hausen" <hausen@punkt.de>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Sharing swap between FreeBSD and Linux, not enough partitions
Date: 2 Jun 1997 16:47:51 GMT
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Joseph Mack <mack@appliedreasoning.com> wrote in
<3392ED3D.E47@appliedreasoning.com>...
> I have a spare partition on my Linux disk on which I would
> like to put FreeBSD. Linux has 3 partitions (/, /usr and swap)
> and only allows 4 partitions. FreeBSD needs 2 partitions 
> (/ and swap). Is there any easy way of using the Linux
> swap partition for FreeBSD when I boot FreeBSD (besides
> manually changing the partition type with fdisk before
> I reboot). Is there any other way around the partition
> problem?

As for the 4 partition limit:

FreeBSD doesn't use one DOS/FDISK-partition per filesystem
as Linux does. It subdivides one single DOS/FDISK-partition
(which the FreeBSD folks chose to call "slices") further into
the regular filesystems /, /usr, /var, etc. (which the FreeBSD
folks chose to call "partitions" - this is consistent with BSD
but somewhat confusing, since the SysVR4 crowd did it the other
way round. ;-)

So you don't have a problem with that. Using the FreeBSD
installation floppy, create a single primary FreeBSD partition,
then go to the label editor and call "Auto defaults for all" once
to get a feeling for the setup. Tweak your filesystem sizes
as necessary.

As for the wasted space (2 swap areas): dunno.

Patrick