Pre-Porting from linux questions

[dcbdbis]

Good afternoon,


I would like to use FreeBSD as my primary OS. I have a couple of obstacles that googling isn't answering. So before I proceed imprudently and loses a lot of data in the process I would ask for answers for the three questions following:


a) My system has 2.5TB of data online in ext4 fs's. Can I mount ext4 in FBSD for the purpose of moving the data in FBSD? If so, can you direct me to the link?

b) May I set my own compiler flags for my cpu, and reliably have BSD rebuild itself from source?

c) Win4BSD claims that you can run Windows as a guest in FreeBSD as a host. Is this claim viable, or is their another VM Host for BSD solution that the community is using? I've done qemu before, but I would like less pain in setup and management. I need win emulation because the accounting software is not wine friendly.


Thank you for your time.


Sincerely,


Dave

[Djn]

I can't guarantee that ext4 will be mountable. If, and only if, it can be treated as ext2 for the sake of reading (like you can with ext3), the tools are built in. I'd suggest you boot a FreeBSD liveCD (e.g. FreeSBIE) and try to mount it (with -t ext2fs -o ro) to see what it does.

You can set compiler flags, but not all of them are guaranteed to work. As an example, rebuilding the kernel with -O3 isn't always a good idea. Generally speaking, the default flags are chosen for a reason and should be left alone. However, you can set your CPU type - this will change the flags that are used.

I'm afraid qemu is your best bet on the VM front. Wine works like on linux, and there's no obviously better VMs around. I haven't tried Win4BSD, though - maybe it's good.

[dcbdbis]

That's all I needed to know. Ext4 is backwards compatible with both ext3 and 2.

So...I'm good to go!


Thank You!


Dave

[Djn]

Please, do test before you do anything permanent. :)

[dcbdbis]

I have a seperate PC entirely for the sole purpose of experimentation. It's A 8 core xeon of recent vintage with 8GB of ram.

It has no live data on it.


Thanks again!


Dave

[Djn]

Heh, that's a rather extravagant test rig. :)

Do use 7.1 amd64; anything else would be a bit of a waste. (The earlier releases aren't as good at SMP.)

[dcbdbis]

I do speech recognition development on it. It needs some H.P.

But it is a devel workstation, not the primary repository.

I have 7.1 x64 up and running gnome as we speak. It may be this particular machine (Dell Precision T7400)....Thge only issue I am having is that FBSD and this machine's USB keyboard/mouse are sure not cohabiting in peace.

So I'll be scoping the forums for difficult USB devices.


Dave