For a long time, I’ve been wishing to be able to have a partition with just one filesystem that can be shared by multiple operating systems. It would make data access on multiboot systems so much easier. Alas, for quite a long time, I had to side with a minimum of a dual-machine setup: one machine is the multiboot machine, the other machine is an always-on Unix file server.
But, we can in fact do better than that.
But, as it turns out, in spite of the lack of agreement in operating system developers on a single filesystem where the operating system itself can be installed, there is another alternative that has truly come to reality. What if you could share the data blocks of files but have two copies of the filesystem metadata in the desired formats of the separate operating systems? Although that still would not be ideal, it would at least allow for a read-only volume accessible from both operating systems without consuming double the disk space.
Write two or more filesystems in one? Yes, but read-only except from Unix.
But wait… don’t get over-excited, I was exaggerating a bit. Aww,
yes, wishful thinking. But, nevertheless, here is something to at
least spark the imagination: cursedfs. a script to create a
partition with both a FAT32 and ext2 filesystem within it. The two
filesystems don’t share file data blocks, unfortunately.
20200123/https://github.com/NieDzejkob/cursedfs