Anaconda LVM and file system size limitations

Eric Smith eric at brouhaha.com
Thu Nov 13 18:48:37 UTC 2003


"Jeremy Katz" <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> Also, in general, most drivers are only safe up to a terabyte -- some can
> go to 2, but it's driver dependent in 2.4.x and so it was deemed better to
> err on the side of caution

That might justify an "are you sure you want to do this" dialog, but it
doesn't justify a hard limit (IMNSHO).

I've used other 2.4.x based distributions with >1 TB without problems,
so at least some drivers (such as 3ware) handle it fine.  The 3ware card
as a documented limit of 2 TB.  I'm hoping that they release new firmware
to eliminate that limit, but it won't help until we use a 2.6.x kernel.

> It wasn't working, that's why it's set to 1 TB.

I suppose that would be OK for Fedora, except that I can't imagine
Red Hat Enterprise Server customers being happy about that (I wouldn't),
and IINM Fedora is supposed to be the testing ground for Enterprise
stuff.

So far with the patched Anaconda it looks like the only problem is in the
parted library, and that problem occurs even with unpatched Anaconda if
there is a preexisting partition >1 TB.  So even if you don't need the
Anaconda to create such partitions, you won't be able to upgrade a machine
that has them.

I'm out of time for hacking on it this week, but next week I'll see if
standalone parted has the same problem.  If so, that should be much easier
to debug.

Best regards,
Eric





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