Hello,

> > Well, as I said, on my iBook NetBSD lives happily in a UFS partition, no problems at all to access it from OSX. Didn't try soft
> > dependencies yet though.
> 
> softdeps don't actually change the structure of the UFS on disk though, right?
That's what I thought.

> it just changes the way the kernel/driver schedules writes and such.  or am
> i completely off base?
Well, it you're off base here I'm too, but the FreeBSD folks handle soft dependencies as a filesystem flag, not a mount option, apparently they think fsck should know if soft dependencies were in use which suggests that there may be some subtle differences.
Apart from that - I wonder why Apple doesn't use them ( or maybe they do but don't tell anyone? )

have fun
Michael