Re: [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

From: Mingming Cao
Date: Fri Jun 09 2006 - 11:22:07 EST


Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:20:54 PDT, Mingming Cao said:

Current ext3 filesystem is limited to 8TB(4k block size), this is
practically not enough for the increasing need of bigger storage as
disks in a few years (or even now).

To address this need, there are co-effort from RedHat, ClusterFS, IBM
and BULL to move ext3 from 32 bit filesystem to 48 bit filesystem,
expanding ext3 filesystem limit from 8TB today to 1024 PB. The 48 bit
ext3 is build on top of extent map changes for ext3, originally from
Alex Tomas. In short, the new ext3 on-disk extents format is:


which implies matching changes to mkfs.ext2 and possibly mount..


Alexandre Ratchov and Laurent Vivier from BULL have been done some work in e2fsprog to support extents and 48/64 bit ext3, although the patches have not been thoroughly reviewed and discussed yet...

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ext2-devel&m=114848122624510&w=2

Appreciate any comments and feedbacks!


Somebody else was recently discussing a set of patches to ext3 for
extents+delalloc+mballoc patches - is this work compatible with that?

Yes, the extents patch you mentioned is the same one included in the series. The delalloc (support delayed allocation for ext3) and mballoc ( support multiple block allocation based on extents) are considered a future to add, as this series is intend to address the capability issue and on-disk format only.

Also, a pointer to the matching userspace patches would help anybody
who's gung-ho enough to test the code....


Thanks for your interest!

We have tested patch 1-4 (which basically not touching any on-disk format) and they have been in mm tree. Extent patch itself have been tested for a long time by ClusterFS and IBM, as it's actually being posted a while back.

At this point the whole series pass compile, but not being tested yet. This post as a RFC is intend to collect comments and feedbacks. BULL team has done some test on the 2.6.16 version of the series with the e2fsprog changes they posted though. I will upload the matching e2fsprogs changes to ext2.sf.net/48bitsext3 shortly..

Mingming

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