Mark Lord wrote:
Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Mark Lord wrote:
The return value uses "unsigned long",
which on a 32-bit system limits drive offsets to 2TB.
One relevant question is: does anybody seriously care about the
combination of "32 bit" and "huge modern drives" any more?
Sure, we can add a 64-bit version that ends up being used only on
32-bit systems, but quite frankly, I think the solution here is to
just ignore the issue and see if anybody really even cares.
Because quite frankly, the kind of people who buy modern 2TB drives
generally don't then couple them to CPU's that are five+ years old.
..
Yeah. Except Dell will undoubtedly have them in desktops
within 2 years, and tons of people (myself included) still use
32-bit (K)Ubuntu on our systems, simply for the better binary
compatibility that it is perceived to give with things like
browser plugins and stuff.
I think that there are many embedded applications (lots of them linux based)
which have large amounts of storage behind low power, low cost 32 bit CPU's.
Think of the home/small office NAS boxes that you can get from bestbuy or other
big box stores. Those devices today have 4 S-ATA drives (each of which can be
1TB in size).
Also, if you have a very low end box, it can still access really large storage
over iSCSI or a SAN which will present as a local, large device.
Over time, even these low end CPU's will migrate towards 64 bits, but we are not
there yet...
ric
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