per engelbrecht wrote: > Nick Holland wrote: ... >> Would I love to see the 1T limit removed? Sure. HOWEVER, I think I >> would handle this application the exact same way if it didn't exist >> (that might not be true: I might foolishly plowed ahead with the One Big >> Pile philosophy, and regretted it later). > > Hi Nick > > We can argue back and forth on the pros and cons of building >1TB > partitions or not, but the need for these giant allocations are real > enough and from a commen/broader view (small business) the demand is > also moving closer and closer. At work we have a disk-to-disk backup > server for (for customers) with one 1.5TB (SATA raid5) backup partition. > The app works that way and if each customer start using it and used > =<20GB per customer, we would need at least 3.5TB more disk space. > Breaking up in smaller chunks is not always possible/practical. > > I would appresiate an "unlimited" filesystem one day - but not at the > cost of potentially losing data! > I would also just love to see "OpenBSD large-scale enterprise SAN/NAS > solutions" in the LISA program some day :)
No denying it is an annoying limit, but talking about it won't change it. Someone will have to be annoyed enough to sit down and devote their time to figuring out how to deal with it appropriately. No amount of begging by those of us who lack the skills (or in my case, the rigor -- I keep writing programs and finding stooopid bugs and say to myself, "good thing I don't do file system code!" ;) will change that. File system code is about as scary as it gets to work on. Mess up the memory allocation system, or who knows what else, you can always reboot after the panic, and most of your data is still there. Mess up the file system code in a subtle way...you could be writing slightly wrong data to disk for weeks before noticing that you have 2T of trash. In the mean time...while yes, there are apps where One Big Chunk is the only solution, there are lots of apps where "Several Smaller Chunks" is a tollerable solution, and some where it is even the PREFERED solution. In cases where One Big Chunk is the only solution, OpenBSD isn't a contender. In places where it is a tollerable or even prefered solution, OpenBSD's other advantages can still be leveraged. (did I just say "leveraged"?? oh my..the damned tie is cutting off oxygen to my brain!) Nick.
