On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:20:54 PDT, Mingming Cao said:Alexandre Ratchov and Laurent Vivier from BULL have been done some work in e2fsprog to support extents and 48/64 bit ext3, although the patches have not been thoroughly reviewed and discussed yet...
Current ext3 filesystem is limited to 8TB(4k block size), this is
practically not enough for the increasing need of bigger storage as
disks in a few years (or even now).
To address this need, there are co-effort from RedHat, ClusterFS, IBM
and BULL to move ext3 from 32 bit filesystem to 48 bit filesystem,
expanding ext3 filesystem limit from 8TB today to 1024 PB. The 48 bit
ext3 is build on top of extent map changes for ext3, originally from
Alex Tomas. In short, the new ext3 on-disk extents format is:
which implies matching changes to mkfs.ext2 and possibly mount..
Yes, the extents patch you mentioned is the same one included in the series. The delalloc (support delayed allocation for ext3) and mballoc ( support multiple block allocation based on extents) are considered a future to add, as this series is intend to address the capability issue and on-disk format only.Appreciate any comments and feedbacks!
Somebody else was recently discussing a set of patches to ext3 for
extents+delalloc+mballoc patches - is this work compatible with that?
Also, a pointer to the matching userspace patches would help anybody
who's gung-ho enough to test the code....