Re: Large filesystems

[Jeroen Dekkers]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 08:23:34PM +0100, Niels M?ller wrote:
> Jon Arney <jarney1@cox.net> writes:
> 
> > I'm running into a problem, however, when I mount (set translator for)
> > one of the filesystems.
> 
> > Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> > /dev/hdc1              2015984    739996   1173580  39% /hurd
> > /dev/hdc2              5039592   1605844   3177744  34% /hurd/src
> > /dev/hdb1               958977    703747    205690  78% /mnt/hdd1
> 
> There's a known limitation in the ext2 translator at about 1GB, so you
> are not supposed to be able to mount your first two ext2 partitions
> under the hurd at all, which should be mentioned in any Hurd FAQ. But
> I think you would get errors when the translator is first activated,
> before you get the chance to access files on it.

The one 1GB limit is a calculation bases on estimated values. It's not
really a hard limit. It depends on a lot of factors, the real limit
could even differ between systems. Testing different partition sizes,
the limit on my system was around the 1.8GB (thus I've a lot of 1.8GB
partitions on my hard drive). 

It could be possible to mount the /hurd partition. It's not known what
happens if ext2fs runs for a long time on a very big partition which
size is around the limit. I think it's not really impossible that it
causes strange behaviour (i.e. crashes). If you want to be safe, I'll
advice to make your partitions around the 1.5 or 1.6 GB. The /hurd/src
will never work because the is only 4GB of virtual memory, you just
can't mmap() a 5 GB partition.

Jeroen Dekkers 
-- 
Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org
Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org
IRC: jeroen@openprojects

pgp3s9YfAfGEN.pgp
Description: PGP signature