Breaking the 2TB barrier

One set of patches which Linus has merged into his pre-2.5.42 BitKeeper tree is the "large block device" patch by Peter Chubb. Current Linux systems are limited to a mere 2TB in any one block device; this limitation is beginning to hurt users of very large RAID arrays. With the LBD patch, that limitation goes away.

The solution, of course, is to simply redefine the sector_t type as a 64-bit quantity. Mr. Chubb's patches (which can be found in the "patches" section below) do exactly that. Generally, the transition is not that hard; the bulk of the changes, seemingly, are to format strings in printk calls. Much of the rest is changing variables which were defined as int or long over to the sector_t type.

For the most part, it is said to work. Note, however, that software RAID volumes are still limited to 2TB.

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