Tom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hmmm... make me wonder why VFS wasn't fixed long, long ago then.
Linus says that 64 bit words are too inefficient on i386 and that
if you want > 2 GB you should upgrade to a 64 bit architecture, such
as MIPS, Alpha or SPARC. It's the same reason which made a fight
recently about the ``new'' 36-bit virtual addressing scheme in latter Intel's
processors (using segmentation): why bother, if you have a clean
64 bit architecture, to hack around Intel design ``features'' (== problems),
especially for 4 more bits ?
For the > 2 GB files: there are some patches flying around which,
while still making not needing 64 bit arithmetic, allow the use of
> 2 GB files. The principle is to shift the length by PAGE_SIZE bits,
which on i386 is 4096 bytes, and thus allows for 8 TB filesystems.
Those patches need some changes also in the libc to my knowledge. This
is highly experimental. You can find some part of the discussion in
the linux-kernel archives.
This is my understanding of the problem and the possible solutions.
Maybe someone more upto-date could share.
