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The Hurd Gets Support For Large Filesystems

Posted by timothy on from the lumbering-onward-discontentedly dept.

latroM writes "Finally, after many years of waiting, the Hurd has got support for partitions larger than 2GB. The patch is told to be very stable and its development was started about a year and a half ago. Michael Bank writes: 'I hacked the Debian package so far that I make it build a statically compiled ext2fs with Ogi's patch (20041029) for partitions > 2GB. For now, I decided to just copy libpager, libdiskfs and ext2fs to libpager-ogi, libdiskfs-ogi and ext2fs-ogi, apply his patch and dump the result as a new patch. Another patch modifies the Makefiles accordingly.' I did some basic tests with those packages and they work fine for me so far. Any comments on how they work for people and how to possibly improve the packaging and integration of the patch are very welcome."

4 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Take that, Microsoft! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    The mighty HURD has >2 GB filesystem support, and Longhorn still isn't out! Who's laughing now? I ask: Who is laughing now?

  2. Next Up... by DesScorp · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...they're replacing punch cards with a monitor and keyboard. Oooohhhh! An I hear they've got....shhhh...Floppy Drive support on the way!

    They've GOT to fix that 640K thing though...like, gag me with a spoon...

    --
    Life is hard, and the world is cruel
  3. Re:how can one most easily check out the HURD? by albalbo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can get Debian GNU/Hurd, this is the easiest way to install a GNU system. It looks much like Debian GNU/Linux though - in fact, very similar. The GNUishness seems to affect more than the Linuxness ;)

    In terms of differences - Hurd has very different models of doing things. For example, non-root users can effectively mount filesystems if they have all the permissions needed. There are these things called "translators" which is a bit like FUSE or the other user-space filesystem things you get - essentially, generating a filesystem via a program, so you could mount anything you can script really.

    There are lots of other interesting differences. Hurd isn't terribly similar to Linux, and does allow you to do some rather cool things.

    --
    "Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
  4. Actually, we went down a slightly different road by mbanck · · Score: 3, Informative
    Contrary to what I wrote in that post to debian-hurd which got cited for this article, we decided to not do all this patching to have two static ext2fs translators (one supporting big stores larger than 2GB, the default one not) next to each other.

    Instead, after some more testing, we decided to fully apply Ognyan Kulev's patch so that every translated ext2 file system will use it. I committed the code to the Debian Hurd package svn repository yesterday and we will probably upload it by the end of this week.

    Michael