Painted into a corner with i386 system and big FS ...

[UFS User]

I have an older i386 system with an 8TB filesystem on it, roughly 40 million inodes.

It appears that this is impossible to fsck - I have nudged up maxdsiz all the way to:

kern.maxdsiz="3072000000"


and it's not enough.  Any larger values cause the system to become unbootable.

So, my plan is to boot 8.x amd64 FIXIT, and run fsck from the fixit environment.

The issues I foresee are:

1. Do I need to specify a maxdsiz in the 8.x fixit environment, or does this all just autoscale
these days ?  I'm hoping my process doesn't grow past 3.5 GB, but do I need to burn a
custom fixit to do that ?  Or can I drop into the boot loader of FIXIT and set a custom load
value ?

Or perhaps I don't care at all and maxdsiz will just auto-scale to however large the fsck gets ?


2. There is only 4 GB of physical in the system ... if I could grow to 3.072 GB process size in
i386, then all else being equal, I should be able to grow to 3.5 in 8.x FIXIT, right ?


3. If I get larger than 4 GB in amd64, with a 4GB physical memory, I can always swap, right ?
But where would I swap to ?  Maybe I could mount my /var (which is clean, and is 4 GB in size)
and swap to there ?

Can I specify a file-backed swapfile in FIXIT ?


Anything else I am missing ?


Thanks.