newfs limits? 10TB filesystem max?

Brooks Davis brooks at one-eyed-alien.net
Wed Feb 16 23:06:27 GMT 2005


On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 05:00:41PM -0600, Eric Anderson wrote:
> Brooks Davis wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 03:58:19PM -0600, Eric Anderson wrote:
> >
> >>Claus Guttesen wrote:
> >>
> >>>>I've just built an enormous 10TB filesystem.  When
> >>>>trying to newfs the disk, it bombed with something
> >>>>like "cannot allocate memory" after something like
> >>>>23xxxxxxxxx sectors..  I noticed disklabel complains
> >>>>about disks with more than 2^32-1 sectors not being
> >>>>supported..  
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Aren't you supposed to use gpt(8) to define partitions
> >>>larger than 2 TB?
> >>
> >>No idea - this is the first I've heard of gpt really..
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>>Is newfs supposed to be able to work?  I've used the
> >>>>-s option to newfs to limit my filesystem size to
> >>>>the max it would allow, which ends up being
> >>>>11350482546 1K blocks, which means I'm only losing a
> >>>>couple GB, which is no sweat right now for me, but
> >>>>if someone wanted a 20TB filesystem, they'd be
> >>>>hosed.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Then the question is whether newfs reads
> >>>gpt-partitioned disks? From newfs(8):
> >>>
> >>>Before running newfs the disk must be labeled using
> >>>bsdlabel(8). 
> >>>
> >>>How did you create such a huge partition? Your
> >>>question is quite interesting, I'm at a
> >>>storage-solution which supports LUN's larger than 2.2
> >>>TB.
> >>
> >>I used vinum to stripe 6 2TB partitions connected to 2 fiber channel disk 
> >>arrays.  Vinum automatically does the bsdlabel part.  I was merely 
> >>wanting to see what bsdlabel had to say about the vinum disk (if 
> >>anything).
> >>
> >>Using newfs on it worked as long as I specified a smaller sector count.
> >
> >
> >bsdlabels are for the most part unable to access more then 2TB of
> >storage.  You should either newfs the disk directly or use gpt.  If
> >vinum is creating a bsdlabel, the label is almost certaintly bogus if
> >the disk is larger than 2TB.  There is an exception if the disk has
> >sectors larger than 512K, but those are fairly rare.
> 
> Hmm - well, it works.. :)  Is there something I should be aware of that I'm 
> not seeing?

In that case, you probably don't actually have a bsdlabel there.  It's
not longer required with geom since you can newfs disks.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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