From: Joe Moore (Joe.Moore@sdrc.com)
Date: Wed Aug 27 2003 - 10:20:52 EDT
Executive Summary: Solaris 9 version 8/03 has this functionality: It can
handle "disks" up to 16TB in size, and filesystems of the same size. This
functionality requires running the 64-bit kernel.
Thanks to several people for responding:
Justin Stringfellow
Casper Dik
Jay Lessert
Hichael Morton
Grzegorz Bakalarski
Sandeep Ghodke
(I hope procmail/bogofilter didn't eat anyone else's response)
Thanks also to lots of people for letting me know that they are out of the
office. I (well, OK, procmail) actually got the first "Out of Office" before
the original message came back from the list.
I delayed sending this summary because I wanted to actually test the patches
in question. I currently have a 3TB filesystem attached to our backup
server, and our databases are being copied quickly from disk to disk.
The original question: (more info below)
On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 02:44:31PM -0400, Joe Moore wrote:
> I have a large ATA RAID array (Nexsan ATAboy2f) attached to my backup
> server (SunFire V880 running Solaris 8). For various reasons, I'd like
> to be able to present the entire array (about 3TB) as a single filesystem.
>
> According to Sun, all versions of Solaris are limited to 1TB in a single
> filesystem. There is a patch for Solaris 9, however (114129-01 and others)
> which seem to bypass this limitation:
>
> (From the Free Patch Description of 114129-01)
> NOTE: To get the complete Multi-terabyte feature, please install the following
> patches:
>
> 113277-06 (or newer) sd & ssd patch
> 114127-01 (or newer) abi_libefi.so.1 patch
> 114128-01 (or newer) sd_lun patch
> 114131-01 (or newer) libadm.so.1 patch
> 113981-02 (or newer) devfsadm patch
> 114132-01 (or newer) fmthard patch
> 113072-03 (or newer) format patch
> 114369-01 (or newer) prtvtoc patch
> 113049-01 (or newer) luxadm & liba5k.so.2 Patch
>
> Does anyone have experience with this patch set, or with very large
> filesystems in general?
>
> I've looked at vxfs, but I must explore lower-cost options before a purchase
> will be approved.
These patches, which can be applied to Solaris 9, are only half of the picture.
These allow the system to access a 16TB "disk". There are also patches
required for the mkfs, fsck, etc. commands. I was not able to find the patches
for these commands, only references to the new -T option for mkfs.
I ended up doing an upgrade install to the Solaris 9 08/03 environment.
UFS under Solaris is a mature, stable filesystem which has been optimized
over the years to give very good performance. For large UFS filesystems,
you need to use logging to prevent multi-day fsck operations at boot time.
Fortunately, when created with the -T option to mkfs/newfs, logging is the
default.
I had to create new filesystems on the disk array. In retrospect, this makes
sense. Apparently, the multi-terabyte feature is implemented by changing the
addressing model of disk blocks in the filesystem. With older UFS filesystems,
(superblock magic FS_MAGIC) offsets were stored in terms of sectors (512
bytes), in a 32-bit field, which limits the largest offset to 1099511627776
bytes from the start of the disk. With the multi-terabyte UFS filesystem,
(superblock magic MTB_UFS_MAGIC), the offset is stored in terms of the block
size (8192 bytes, a 16x larger unit). ufs(7FS) documents a lot of this,
and $INCLUDE/sys/fs/ufs_{fs,inode}.h are also useful.
Thanks again for all the help,
--Joe
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