Re: XFS fs size limit?

[yocum@fnal.gov]

Steve,

Steve Lord wrote:
> 
> > yocum@fnal.gov wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I asked this of mkp but he doesn't know off the top of his head: is there a
> > > limit to the XFS fs size?  I've tried creating one on just over 1.1TB with
> > > no success:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > > FWIW, I'm using 2.4.5 kernel with R1.0.1.
> >
> >
> > Seth suggested that I get the TOT cmds and try mkfs.xfs with that.  I did,
> > it worked.  Hopefully, I won't run into the problem Jani had a couple weeks
> > ago with FS freezes.  I'll let you know if I do.
> 
> The freeze was a raid5 specific thing, and the only way out of it at


I assume you mean software RAID5, right?  I've got a RAID50 array: 2 8-port
3ware cards in hw raid5, then those two devices combined software raid0.  I
didn't bother to make the log on a separate device, but I could, if need be.


> this kernel revision is to use an external log device with raid5. You
> must also make sure to use an inode size larger than the default with
> a filesystem this big (mkfs ... -i size=512 ...). Without getting to
> technical, this will stop your inode numbers from overflowing 32 bits.
> 
> >
> > Now there's rumors on l-k that the FS size might be limited by the
> > signedness of something in the block layer, effectively limiting us to 1TB.
> 
> We appear to have people working successfully beyond the 1Tbyte boundary,
> the 1Tb limit may be specific to some device drivers which are not as
> cleanly coded.


I haven't been terribly happy with the 3ware drivers/cards in general, so
we'll see.  FWIW, I tried upgrading to their latest driver on an smp system
and simply insmod-ing the newly compiled driver tickles the NMI watchdog
which dumps me directly into kdb.  Fun stuff.  :-/

Cheers,
Dan

-- 
Dan Yocum
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Fermilab  630.840.6509
yocum@fnal.gov, http://www.sdss.org
SDSS.  Mapping the Universe.