[dm-devel] [PATCH] block devices: validate block device capacity
Mikulas Patocka
mpatocka at redhat.com
Mon Feb 3 20:22:01 UTC 2014
On Mon, 3 Feb 2014, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 03:20:17AM -0500, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > So if you think you can support 16TiB devices and leave pgoff_t 32-bit,
> > send a patch that does it.
> >
> > Until you make it, you should apply the patch that I sent, that prevents
> > kernel lockups or data corruption when the user uses 16TiB device on
> > 32-bit kernel.
>
> Exactly. I had actually looked into support for > 16TiB devices for
> a NAS use case a while ago, but when explaining the effort involves
> the idea was dropped quickly. The Linux block device is too deeply
> tied to the pagecache to make it easily feasible.
The memory management routines use pgoff_t, so we could define pgoff_t to
be 64-bit type. But there is lib/radix_tree.c that uses unsigned long as
an index into the radix tree - and pgoff_t is cast to unsigned long when
calling the radix_tree routines - so we'd need to change lib/radix_tree to
use pgoff_t.
Then, there may be other places where pgoff_t is cast to unsigned long and
they are not trivial to find (one could enable some extra compiler
warnings about truncating values when casting them, but I suppose, this
would trigger a lot of false positives). This needs some deep review by
people who designed the memory management code.
Mikulas
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