[Beowulf] Problem with ext3 filesystem?

[Dan.Kidger at quadrics.com]

And anyway - I thought the maximum size for ext3 was 8TB ?

I know that there are patches to bring it up to 16TB, but does anybody trust these and use them for production systems?

Daniel


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Joe Landman
Sent: 12 February 2009 16:17
To: Jin, Yao
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Problem with ext3 filesystem?

Jin, Yao wrote:
> Ten 1TB disks make up of a RAID-5 volume.
> My OS is rockslinux 5.0(based on centos 5.1), only ext3 is available 
> during installation.
> This volumn is partitioned as one single ext3 filesystem.
> 
> On the first reboot after installation , the error occurs:
> The filesystem size is 1952447718 blocks
> Physical size is 341834982 bloks.
> The filesystem is corrupted.
> 
> I find that filesystem size is in agreement with actual capacity( 
> 1952447718*4Kb = 7.27TB).
> 
> The partition can be mounted manually after entering system. But I can't 
> stop worring  about unexpected collapse...

You shouldn't use ext3 for this situation.

How is your RAID set up in terms of partition table?  It needs to be gpt 
based.  Last I checked, Redhat/Centos 5.x had problems booting from GPT 
(is this still true?) based systems.

I would suggest carving out a LUN specific for boot/root, and use the 
rest for storage.  Moreover, use the xfs kernel module.  If rockslinux 
5.0 doesn't support it, I'd suggest looking at different distributions 
(seriously).

Large file system support is not something ext3 is good at, and it is 
something xfs is very good at.

Joe

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