@unixjingleman: It would seem that you have a vague understanding of what a "filesystem" actually is, only the kernel needs to be aware the low-level implementation details. User-land programs need only deal with files and directories that are mapped into a virtual filesystem hierarchy.
OpenBSD/FreeBSD support both ext2 and arguably ext3, but only the former is safe to write to.. ext3 is ext2 with journaling (..a low level capability that "logs" changes to files), this functionality is not supported and mounting a ext3 filesystem rw will probably corrupt critical filesystem metadata (..on-disk structures interpreted by the kernel).
For example, a Windows system connecting to a BSD system over FTP would obviously not need to support FFS.. instead both systems share the concept of "files" and "directories" and communicate using an established protocol.
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