Filesystems larger than 2TB?

[Ivan Voras]

Francisco Reyes wrote:
> Ivan Voras writes:
> 
>> 1. don't use partitions/slices at all and create the file system on the
>> raw device (i.e. newfs /dev/da0)
> 
> But how would one do this on a new machine?
> i.e. If I am setting up a new machine with a 6.2 Stable CD.. isn't the
> install program  basically sysinstall?

If you have a single storage device (RAID array?) on which you want to
install FreeBSD, which is larger than 2 GB, and you want to use up all
the space in it, you cannot do it using sysinstall because sysinstall
only knows about MSDOS partitions and BSD partitions ("bsdlabels"). In
fact, since you can only boot from raw drives, MSDOS and BSD partitions,
your only option is not to use any partitioning, make one huge file
system directly on the device and install FreeBSD manually on it, but
this course of action is absurd.

> Do I setup my smaller partitions such as /, /usr, /var, /tmp and leave
> the end blank and then use "newfs -s /dev/da0s1<letter> ?
> Or perhaps creating a second slice for the remaining space over 2TB?
> Any man pages or URLs you know off that I can read?

No, if you use *any* partitioning scheme except GPT you're limited to 2
TB "total" usable space covered by the partitions. And you can't use GPT...

> So far the only thing I found was the "-s" parameter to newfs.

It doesn't apply to your case.

The only reasonable (well, as far as circumstances permit) thing you can
do is get a smaller drive into the machine, install and partition it
"normally" using sysinstall, MSDOS and BSD partitions, boot from it, and
then use GPT to partition the big device, mount it, etc.

>> 2. use GPT partitions.
> 
> What is the drawback of using that approach?

You can't boot from it, it's not supported by sysinstall.

This might change in 7.0, but there are no enthusiastic volunteers to do
the work as of yet so don't count on it :(

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