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Linux Kernel Partition and FS Physical Limits?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-much-can-it-handle dept.

dmelomed asks: "I would like to Ask Slashdot about Linux's PHYSICAL limits of partition and FS size on i386 and 64 bit chips. What are the maximum real-life possible partition sizes on big RAIDs (several TB) that the kernel can work with reliably? What are better filesystems to use that handle LARGE RAIDS?"

1 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? by rbf · · Score: 2

    WTF? Doesn't anyone RTFM anymore? Ohh, and you never said which filesystem! I'll assume (there's that evil word again!) you mean EXT2...


    How about The Filesystems-HOWTO? A quote from section 6.2:

    ``Standard'' Ext2fs features

    The Ext2fs supports standard Unix file types: regular files, directories, device special files and symbolic links.

    Ext2fs is able to manage filesystems created on really big partitions. While the original kernel code restricted the maximal filesystem size to 2 GB, recent work in the VFS layer have raised this limit to 4 TB. Thus, it is now possible to use big disks without the need of creating many partitions.

    Ext2fs provides long file names. It uses variable length directory entries. The maximal file name size is 255 characters. This limit could be extended to 1012 if needed.

    Ext2fs reserves some blocks for the super user (root). Normally, 5% of the blocks are reserved. This allows the administrator to recover easily from situations where user processes fill up filesystems.


    Quote from section 6.3:

    Ext3 support the same features as Ext2, but includes also Journaling.


    Maybe you should RTFM and be a little more specific next time! ;-)