Re: Large File support and blocks.

From: Albert D. Cahalan (acahalan@cs.uml.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 19:51:01 EST


Rik van Riel writes:
> On Mon, 4 Sep 2000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 01, 2000 at 09:16:23AM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:

>>> With all the talk about bugs and slowness on a 386/486/586
>>> -- does anyone think those platforms will have multi-T disks
>>> hooked up to them?

Note: no "686" mentioned.

>> Yes. They are already doing it, and the number of people trying
>> is growing rapidly. I had people doing half-TB arrays of ext2
>> even 3 or 4 years ago on Intel hardware.
>
> There was a nice thread on one of the freebsd lists last
> week. They calculated that a 1TB fileserver would cost
> somewhere between $3000 and $12000, depending on how much
> performance you want (and whether you'd like hot-plugging
> of drives or not).
>
> With this kind of cost (and dropping all the time), it is
> indeed a very realistic thing that people /will/ be using
> multi-TB disk arrays on 32-bit machines without wanting to
> upgrade to a 64-bit machine for this ...

Ugh... yes, but not with an 80386, i486, Pentium, Pentium-MMX,
5x86, Crusoe, WinChip, K6, K6-2, or 6x86. Also not with XT disks
or anything off the EISA, VLB, and MCA busses.

So it is OK to enable multi-terabyte access only when the
kernel is compiled for a modern non-laptop chip, and to prevent
use of ancient hardware in such a system. This ought to severely
reduce the need to muck with drivers for 1980's hardware.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 21:00:20 EST