[plug] Config new h/w for RAID XP and Linux

[Leon Brooks]

On Friday 29 April 2005 11:09, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 07:59 +0800, Paul Loring wrote:
>> The RAID 0 would need a work file or scratch space partition, would
>> this be sharable between Linux and XP? 

> Probably not. Both can read fat32, but both have various limitations
> on that filesystem.

NTFS write access is practical from a modern Linux, as long as you don't 
get too fancy. The FAT32 limitations are generally not crippling, but 
don't expect anything you could regard as "performance" out of it.

> They can't share swap or, AFAIK, any other common read/write
> filesystem types. 

"Share" is a bit of an ambiguous word here. What you _can_ do is timeshare 
a swap partition. It requires a little bit of scripting, but what you do 
is when you boot into Linux you format the swap partition immediately 
before trying to use it, and when you're shutting Linux down you rewrite 
enough of the headers to convince XP that it's useable. AFAIK this still 
works for XP, if not you can share a swap _file_ made in FAT32 land (the 
performance hit for this is small since almost all of it happens on 
startup):

    http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Swap-Space-1.html

In these days of 200GB drives, it's not normally necessary.

Cheers; Leon