Re: [PATCH][ALPHA 3] ext2fs and large stores (> 1.5G)

[Robert Millan]

Hi Ognyan!

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 02:51:37PM +0300, Ognyan Kulev wrote:
> 
> RELIABILITY
> -----------
> 
> I put a great effort (and time) to assure that there will be no problems 
> with Alpha 3.  Unfortunately, I still can't claim that.  Data corruption 
> seems to be gone, but there are some strange hangs after an hour of 
> compiling glibc (on P4 1.6G) that I cannot look closely.  For example, 
> the compilation is working in screen program window, but keyboard 
> doesn't respond, even Alt-F2 doesn't work (console server is running). 
> I connect to telnetd, do "ps ax", and after some printed lines, the 
> machine reboots...  If you don't push the ext2fs server too much, there 
> is a chance you won't have problems.

Are you running your patched server as the root filesystem?

> E2FSPROGS
> ---------
> 
> e2fsprogs uses Unix API to work with partitions/images.  Unfortunately, 
> we have a limit of 2G for files, so I've made an ugly patch for 
> e2fsprogs that uses libstore in e2fsck as "Hurd IO manager".  Probably 
> when the patch is polished, I'll send it upstream.

Why not fix the 2G limit instead? This adds more work in maintaining
e2fsprogs code and is a hack that distracts from the real problem
that needs fixing.

Anyway, most people create their partitions for GNU from a GNU/Linux
system so e2fsprogs shouldn't have much problem.

-- 
Robert Millan