BIG files & file systems

Peter J. Braam (braam@clusterfs.com)
Wed, 31 Jul 2002 13:16:20 -0600


Hi,

I've just been told that some "limitations" of the following kind will
remain:
page index = unsigned long
ino_t = unsigned long

Lustre has definitely been asked to support much larger files than
16TB. Also file systems with a trillion files have been requested by
one of our supporters (you don't want to know who, besides I've no
idea how many bits go in a trillion, but it's more than 32).

I understand why people don't want to sprinkle the kernel with u64's,
and arguably we can wait a year or two and use 64 bit architectures,
so I'm probably not going to kick up a fuss about it.

However, I thought I'd let you know that there are organizations that
_really_ want to have such big files and file systems and get quite
dismayed about "small integers". And we will fail to deliver on a
requirement to write a 50TB file because of this.

My first Linux machine was a 25MHz i386 with a 40MB disk....

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