RE: 2.5.28 and partitions

Linus Torvalds
2002-07-25T15:52:54Z

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Alexander Viro wrote:>
> On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > Right now that means that 16TB really is a hard limit for at least some
> > device access on a 32-bit machine with a 4kB page-size (yes, you could
> > make a filesystem that is bigger, but you very fundamentally cannot make
> > individual files larger than 16TB).
>
> ITYM "8Tb" - indices are signed, IIRC. OTOH, it's not 2^31 * PAGE_SIZE -
> it's 2^31 * PAGE_CACHE_SIZE, which can be bigger.

Hmm. The index really should be unsigned, but obviously there could be
sign errors.

The stupid BSD approach of putting metadata in negative offsets is just
that - stupid. Under Linux the people who do that just have another
address space for metadata.

Your PAGE_CACHE_SIZE vs PAGE_SIZE thing is true, but separating the two
out is going to be less than pleasant in practice, methinks.

Linus