ext3 4TB fs limit on amd64 (FAQ?)

[Andreas Dilger]

On Dec 20, 2006  13:58 -0600, Alex Lazarevich wrote:
> Is this still true? 8KiB pagefile only on linux/alpha? We run RHEL4-AS 
> x64_86 on AMD Opteron, and the OS is going to let me create the 8192 
> block size on a 9TB partition, but it's giving a warning:
> 
> partition is: Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-9296872.000 megabytes
> 
> [root at dudemiestro ~]# mkfs.ext3 -b 8192 -m 1 /dev/sda1
> Warning: blocksize 8192 not usable on most systems.
> mke2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
> mkfs.ext3: 8192-byte blocks too big for system (max 4096)
> Proceed anyway? (y,n)

Sadly, x86_64 also has 4kB PAGE_SIZE like i386 (for compatibility
reason or whatever).  I'd always hoped for 8kB+ PAGE_SIZE when we
got to 64-bit but it seems this will never happen.

> Anyone do this before and had any kind of success?

You need Alpha, PPC, ia64, mips, arm?, or possibly other non-*86
arch to have large PAGE_SIZE, or fix the VM to support larger
PAGE_SIZE than the hardware.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.