[gentoo-amd64] Re: trouble creating an ext3 filesystem > 8TB

[Duncan]

Joshua Hoblitt <jhoblitt@××××××××××.edu> posted
20070410211253.GA24125@××××××××××.edu, excerpted below, on  Tue, 10 Apr
2007 11:12:53 -1000:

> After looking through various patches that were posted to LKML, I
> discovered that passing "-F" to mke2fs seems to make this work as
> expected.  However, this behavior seems to be undocumented and that
> makes me more then a little nervous.
>
> The resulting filesystem does seem to be mountable:
>
>     /dev/sda4               11T   173M    11T   1% /export/ipp003.0
>
> Is this feature undocumented for a reason or is it just unsupported?

Hmm... no clue about e2fs (reiserfs here), but -F = force, so yeah, I can 
see why you'd be rather uncomfortable using it.

>From following the various kernel articles on LWN, including some eXfs
ones (X=2/3/4), I could strongly speculate that they are doing it to 
enable backward compatibility.  Since the 16 T support is so new, they 
don't enable it by default, thus allowing older kernels to boot the 
resulting filesystems as well.  If one knows what they are doing and 
presumably knows not to try to load the filesystems with older kernels 
that can't properly handle 16 T partitions, there's the force switch to 
enable it, but it doesn't do it by default to ensure backward 
compatibility by default.

However, that would be simply speculation, altho I'd like to think it's 
at least somewhat informed speculation.  It's your data and your risk if 
I'm wrong, not mine, so feel free to treat this as worth exactly what you 
paid for it, zero. =8^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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