[CentOS] centos6 filesystem size limit

Sun Jan 2 21:49:44 UTC 2011
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

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.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF