Re: 2.5.28 and partitions

Jason L Tibbitts III
2002-07-25T03:57:08Z

>>>>> "AV" == Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> writes:

AV> That stuff becomes an issue for 2Tb disks. Do we actually have
AV> something that large attached to 32bit boxen?

Yes, I just built a few machines with 2.2TB of disk apiece. And this
isn't really all that esoteric; each box only cost around $7K.

AV> ... and still use i386 with these disks? ia64 is stillborn, but
AV> x86-64 promises to be more useful than Itanic.

Well, these are just file servers. It would be a waste to stick a
64bit processor in there just for its 64bitness; if I could get
Hammers, I'd rather run compute jobs on them and leave the menial
tasks like file serving to the 32bit machines.

AV> u64 for sector_t doesn't change anything for 64bit boxen that
AV> might be interested in really large disks and screws 32bit ones
AV> that shouldn't have to pay for that...

Well, I'd happily run a custom kernel on these machines. I certainly
don't want my other hundred-plus machines to run slower just to let a
handful of file servers see all of their disk, but it would be nice to
have the choice.

- J<