On Dec 06, 2004 14:54 -0800, Guolin Cheng wrote: > If the ext3 file system maximum size updated or it is still 4TB for > 2.6.* kernel? The site at > http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html says that it > is 4TB yet, but I would like to know if it is possible to create and use > stable & easy-to-fix (or at least as stable & easy-to-fix as ext3) file > systems as big as 100TB for 32 bit Linux architecture? I don't think it is practical to have such gigantic filesystems for ext3, even if it would be possible. Currently for ia64 and ppc64 and Alpha you could use larger blocksize (up to 64kB) to give up to 2^31 * 64kB = 2^47 or 128TB filesystems without (I think) any changes. We had reports of one user trying to use a 4TB ext3 filesystem but there were problems when they wrote more than 2TB (though it was unclear whether the problems were from ext3, MD RAID, or the block/SCSI layer). However, with such extremely large filesystems the e2fsck time would be incredibly large I think (it grows with block count and inode count). Not to be self-serving, but Lustre (which uses ext3 as the back-end filesystem) has several customers running with 100TB+ filesystems and will have a 900TB installation next year. It can do this by aggregating multiple independent ext3 filesystems together, and also scales the number of fileservers so that you have better performance in addition to just a very large single-server filesystem. It isn't for everyone (a GPL version is available, but it isn't trivial to set up/use yet) but it is reliable enough to use on half of the world's largest Linux systems. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://members.shaw.ca/adilger/ http://members.shaw.ca/golinux/
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