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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 22:16:39 -0800
From: Brian Pomerantz <bapper@piratehaven.org>
To: Peter Samuelson <peter@cadcamlab.org>
Cc: Reto Baettig <baettig@scs.ch>,
        Linux Kernel Mailinglist <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 64bit offsets for block devices ?
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On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 10:07:57PM -0600, Peter Samuelson wrote:
> 
> > Don't you think that we will run into problems anyway because soon
> > there will be raid systems with a couple of Terrabytes of space to
> > waste for mp3's ;-)
> 
> A couple of terabytes is fine.  That's 32 bits of blocks.  *More* than
> that, now, we've got a problem.
> 

Which is exactly what we're going to be dealing with "real soon now".
I'm going to be putting together a RAID system with between 1.7-5.1TB
by February.  This will be seen as a single block device to clients
via a network block device (more than likely it will be 16 Ciprico
Rimfire 7000's spread across 4 nodes via a Quadrics switch).  So, what
I'm seeing right now is that I won't be able to address this amount of
space with a single block device.  By the summer of 2001 we could be
looking at putting together 10-150TB (depends on budget and need) of
disk space for a production cluster and it would be nice if our
parallel filesystem could span that entire space with a single image.

That being said, has anyone started making changes to accommodate large
devices like this in the block layer, at least on 64bit architectures?
I don't think we are seriously considering anything other than Alphas
at this point.


BAPper
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