2GB memory limit running fsck on a +6TB device

Theodore Tso tytso at mit.edu
Tue Jun 10 13:18:28 UTC 2008


On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 03:36:52PM +1200, Greg Trounson wrote:
> Andreas Dilger wrote:
>> On Jun 09, 2008  19:33 +0200, santi at usansolo.net wrote:
> ...
>>> Running fsck with a 64bit LiveCD will solve the problem?
>> Yes, I suspect with a 64-bit kernel you could allocate the full 4GB of RAM
>> for e2fsck and be able to check the filesystem.
>
> Couldn't you achieve the same thing just by enabling PAE on your 32-bit 
> kernel?

No, that doesn't increase the amount address space available to the
user process, which is the limitation here.  You can have 16 GB of
physical memory, but 2**32 is still 4GB, and the kernel needs address
space, so that means userspace will have at most 3GB of space to
itself.

						- Ted




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