On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 at 6:41pm, Francois Caen wrote
> On 9/11/05, Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Having hit a similar issue (big FS, I wanted XFS, but needed to run centos
> > 4), I just went ahead and stuck with ext3. My FS is 5.5TiB -- a software
> > RAID0 across 2 3w-9xxx arrays. I had no issues formatting it and have had
> > no issues in testing or production with it. So, it can be done. Perhaps
> > the bugs you're hitting are in the FC driver layer?
>
> ext3 had a 4TB limit:
> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html)
> which I didn't know when I started this thread.
As I mentioned, I'm running centos-4, which, as we all know, is based off
RHEL 4. If you go to <http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/features/>,
they explicitly state that they support ext3 FSs up to 8TB.
> I found it the hard way, through testing.
> There are ways to force past that limit (mkpartfs ext2 in parted, then
> tune2fs -j), but the resulting filesystem is totally unstable.
>
> Joshua, how the heck did you format your 5.5TB in ext3? You 100% sure
> it's not mounted as ext2?
To answer the 2nd question:
[jlb@$HOST ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
.
.
/dev/md0 5.5T 634G 4.9T 12% /nefs
[jlb@$HOST ~]$ mount
.
.
/dev/md0 on /nefs type ext3 (rw)
As to the first, I created the FS as simply as possible. /dev/sdb and
/dev/sdc both look like this:
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-2860920.000 megabytes
Disk label type: gpt
Minor Start End Filesystem Name Flags
1 0.017 2860919.983
I then did a software RAIDO across them, and finally:
mke2fs -b 4096 -j -m 0 -R stride=1024 -T largefile4 /dev/md0
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
