Re: huge filesystems

From: jmerkey
Date: Mon Mar 14 2005 - 12:09:35 EST



I am running the DSFS file system as a 7 TB file system on 2.6.9. There are a host
of problems with the current VFS, ad I have gotten around most of them by **NOT** using the linux page cache interface. The VFS I am using creates a virtual represeation of the files and it's own cache. You need a lot of memory - 2GB roughly. The only way to do it at present is to use the address patch that reserves 1GB for user address space and leaves 3GB of space
in kernel in order to create the caches.

You also need to ignore the broken fdisk partitioning tools. Just create one partition if you
create disks larger than 2 TB with 3Ware, and ignore the values in the table. I check for a single partition on these devices and rely on the capacity parameter reported from the
bdev handle and just use the extra space.

Linux proper has a long way to go on this topic, but it is possible I am doing this today
on 2.6.9.

Jeff


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