linux-ext4 - Re: ext4 64bit (disk >16TB) question

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Date:	Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:42:01 +0200
From:	Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@....de>
To:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ext4 64bit (disk >16TB) question

Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 09:50:56PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> I found ext4 64bit patches for e2fsprogs 1.39 that fix at least
>> mkfs. Does anyone know if there is an updated patch set for 1.41
>> anywhere? And when will that be added to e2fsprogs upstream?
>
> Yes, this is correct.  The 1.39 64-bit patches break the shared
> library ABI, and also there were some long-term problems with having
> super-large bitmaps taking huge amounts of memory without some kind of
> run-length encoding or other compression technique.  I decided to
> reject the 1.39 approach because it would have caused short- and
> long-term maintenance issues.

Is that a problem for the kernel or for the user space? I notices that
mke2fs 1.39 used over a gigabyte memory to format a >16TiB disk. While
being a lot that is not really a problem here.

> At the moment 1.41 does not support > 32 bit block numbers.  The
> priority was to get something which supported all of the other ext4
> features out the door, since that would allow much better testing of
> the ext4 code base.  We are now working on 64-bit support in
> e2fsprogs, with mke2fs coming first, and the other tools coming later.
> But yeah, good quality 64-bit e2fsprogs support is going to lag for a
> bit.  Sorry, we're working as fast as we can, given the resources we
> have.

Will there be filesystem changes as well? The above mentioned
run-length encoding sounds a bit like a new bitmap format or is that
only supposed to be the in memory format in userspace?

What is the plan of how to add 64-bit support to the shared lib now?
Will you introduce a do_foo64() function in parallel to do_foo() to
maintain abi compatibility? Will you add versioned symbols? Or will
there be an abi break at some point?

The reason I ask all this is because I'm willing to spend some time
patching and testing. A single >16TiB filesystem instead of multiple
smaller ones would be a great benefit for us.

> Regards,
>
> 						- Ted

MfG
        Goswin
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