[Beowulf] Problem with ext3 filesystem?

[Joe Landman]

Dan.Kidger at quadrics.com wrote:
> And anyway - I thought the maximum size for ext3 was 8TB ?

It is w/o the patches.  With patches it can get to 16TB.  I seem to 
remember that the 16TB required an 8kB page size (e.g. Itanium2 kernel).

> I know that there are patches to bring it up to 16TB, but does
> anybody trust these and use them for production systems?

I am sure a few people are using this.  We just don't advise/recommend 
this file system at these sizes.

Lustre uses a (significantly patched) ext3 right now to get beyond 8TB 
per OSD.  Since they appear to be migrating over to zfs, and their 
patches aren't in the kernel yet (will go back and recheck), this is 
still a problem.

Since we have customers/users with 40+ TB on single boxen we don't 
normally recommend file systems that run close to their limits in daily 
usage scenarios.  That and fsck ...  well ...

Joe

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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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