On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 04:49:44PM -0500, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jan 2011 at 1:45pm, Robert Arkiletian wrote
I just read the rhel6 filesystem size limit.
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/
It says 16TB limit for ext4 (same as ext3)?!?! I thought ext4 was supposed to support 1EB ( ~ 1 million TB) limit. That was one of the main advantages of rhel6. After a little more digging all I found was that the user space formatting tools (mkfs.ext4) only support 32bit filesystems (not 48bits). I'm surprised about this, I thought people would be waiting for >16TB support in rhel6. Does anyone know if this is going to change in point releases of rhel/centos6?
I did some googling on this recently, and I found that while ext4 theoretically supports such large filesystems (and you can find/compile userspace tools to create them), the developers don't really recommend using it for such yet. It's just not deemed ready for production yet. I saw multiple recommendation (including from RH devs) to use XFS if you need filesystems that big.
I think there's a problem at least in mkfs.ext4 etc, they're not able to handle >16TB filesystems yet.
-- Pasi