Is it possible to install pfsense 2.4 on an EXT4 partition?

Guest

We are cautiously moving ahead with our pfsense 2.3.4 upgrades to 2.4 on an installed base of 65 or so SOHO routers.

So far on some hardware the upgrade was a snap on others it was impossible as pfsense and FreeBSD 11 installers would constantly crash.

But, more generally speaking after upgrading a dozen machines we are not happy with ZFS which seems to tax our relatively low end hardware to the point that they can't perform at the same level than when we had 2.3.4.

Of course we reinstalled those machines with UFS (or UFS2 - whatever that enigmatic format is) but as we go through this heavy lifting we wonder if it would be possible to install on EXT4 type partitions?
Alternatively, assuming that FreeBSD boot loader can't work on EXT4 how to split the installation so that minimal generic stuff goes into the UFS and the rest into an EXT4 partition?

Our preference for EXT4 is because of the tools that we have available to handle those partitions.

Also, even though pfsense preserves the UFS partition during the upgrade on our (largely diversified) hardware base the upgrade fails at one moment or another in 75% of the cases. In 50% of those cases repeating the upgrade usually completes the upgrade. In the rest sometimes a third launching of the upgrade process completes the task or the machines are so trashed that we need to do a clean install, at which time ZFS becomes a choice.

Thanks for any help.

Grimson

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/filesystems-linux.html

Guest

@Grimson:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/filesystems-linux.html

Thanks for pointing to the obvious!
Yes we are particularly familiar with the FreeBSD habdbook and we saw the line "This driver can also be used to access ext3 and ext4 file systems. However, ext3 journaling and extended attributes are not supported. Support for ext4 is read-only.", and that's why we are here to ask to more knowledgeable (!?) people and hopefully get some good advice.

kpa

The only common filesystem between Linux and FreeBSD that might work realistically is ZFS but ZFS multi-OS multiboot is not for the faint of heart.