[dm-devel] Re: How to handle >16TB devices on 32 bit hosts ??
Andreas Dilger
adilger at sun.com
Sat Jul 18 04:31:55 UTC 2009
On Jul 18, 2009 10:08 +1000, Neil Brown wrote:
> It has recently come to by attention that Linux on a 32 bit host does
> not handle devices beyond 16TB particularly well.
>
> In particular, any access that goes through the page cache for the
> block device is limited to a pgoff_t number of pages.
> As pgoff_t is "unsigned long" and hence 32bit, and as page size is
> 4096, this comes to 16TB total.
:
:
> I suppose we could add a CONFIG option to make pgoff_t be
> "unsigned long long". Would the cost/benefit of that be acceptable?
I think the point is that for those people who want to use > 16TB
devices on 32-bit platforms (e.g. embedded/appliance systems) the
choice is between "completely non-functional" and "uses a bit more
memory per page", and the answer is pretty obvious.
For users who don't want to support this, they don't have to (just
like CONFIG_LBD or whatever), and for 64-bit systems it is irrelevant.
I think years ago we had the idea that it would be 64-bit everywhere
by now, and while that is true for many systems, embedded/appliance
systems will probably continue to be 32-bit for as long as they can.
Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.
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