[Beowulf] Problem with ext3 filesystem?

[Michael Will]

For large non-lustre filesystems of that size, we have been deploying 
XFS successfully for the last 3-4 years at least. We have a few
deployments using centos plus to get it onto a redhat based system
but generally have to chose Novell SLES to get a fully supported XFS
solution.

Cheers, Michael Will
On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 01:44:55PM -0500, Joe Landman wrote:
> 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
>
> -- 
> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
> Founder and CEO
> Scalable Informatics LLC,
> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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