jjensen@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jeff Jensen) (06/08/91)
Hello, We're running Ultrix 4.1 Rev 52 off of a DecStation 3100. We are in the process of getting a new drive, of about 1.2gig. Now to the question... For some reason, I seem to remember hearing that there were problems running a disk of this size under Ultrix. Is this true, and if so, are there any patches? Any information/pointers to places to look would be appreciated. -Jeff Jensen jjensen@fenris.claremont.edu jjensen@hmcvax.bitnet jjensen@jarthur.claremont.edu
sysmark@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) (06/10/91)
In article <12232@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> jjensen@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jeff Jensen) writes: | We're running Ultrix 4.1 Rev 52 off of a DecStation 3100. We are in the | process of getting a new drive, of about 1.2gig. Now to the question... | For some reason, I seem to remember hearing that there were problems | running a disk of this size under Ultrix. Is this true, and if so, are | there any patches? Any information/pointers to places to look would be | appreciated. Although I rarely use Ultrix these days, I'll make a moderately educated guess (since I haven't seen any other replies, authoritative or otherwise, to your question). The following article from comp.sys.sgi implies that, yes, there is (or at least was) a problem with Ultrix and large drives. But it also suggests that these problems may have been fixed recently. Maybe someone from DEC will provide information more accurate than my random surmises. (C'mon Fred, where are ya? ;-) | From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) | Subject: Re: Adding a 3'rd party disk drive to PI | Message-ID: <1991Jun7.204440.1988@odin.corp.sgi.com> | Date: 7 Jun 91 20:44:40 GMT | References: <1010@ki.UUCP> | Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA | | In <1010@ki.UUCP> dwatts@ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes: | | | [ ... ] | | | | Can the Iris make full use of a 1.2GB drive? The specific model I'm | | looking at is a Wren 7. | | | | [ ... ] | | Yes, the PI doesn't have the same braindead scsi driver that all but | the most recent Sun and Ultrix releases had. They were using 6 byte | SCSI cmds, and that caused the block number to wrap at 1Gb. SGI has | always used the 10 byte commands, and there is no problem with drives | greater than 1Gb formatted. The Wren VII is a pretty good drive, and | is one that we resell, so you should see no problems with it. Mark Bartelt 416/978-5619 Canadian Institute for mark@cita.toronto.edu Theoretical Astrophysics mark@cita.utoronto.ca
yzarn@lhdsy1.chevron.com (Philip Yzarn de Louraille) (06/11/91)
In article <12232@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> jjensen@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jeff Jensen) writes: >We're running Ultrix 4.1 Rev 52 off of a DecStation 3100. We are in the >process of getting a new drive, of about 1.2gig. Now to the question... >For some reason, I seem to remember hearing that there were problems >running a disk of this size under Ultrix. Is this true, and if so, are >there any patches? Any information/pointers to places to look would be >appreciated. Nah. Just don't make any partition any bigger than 1 GB and you will be fine. -- Philip Yzarn de Louraille Internet: yzarn@chevron.com Research Support Division Unix & Open Systems Chevron Information & Technology Co. Tel: (213) 694-9232 P.O. Box 446, La Habra, CA 90633-0446 Fax: (213) 694-7709
grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (06/11/91)
>>>>> On 10 Jun 91 17:12:23 GMT, yzarn@lhdsy1.chevron.com (Philip Yzarn de Louraille) said: PYdL> In article <12232@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> jjensen@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jeff Jensen) writes: >We're running Ultrix 4.1 Rev 52 off of a DecStation 3100. We are in the >process of getting a new drive, of about 1.2gig. Now to the question... >For some reason, I seem to remember hearing that there were problems >running a disk of this size under Ultrix. Is this true, and if so, are >there any patches? Any information/pointers to places to look would be >appreciated. PYdL> Nah. Just don't make any partition any bigger than 1 GB and you will be PYdL> fine. PYdL> -- -- wrong. If you're using a pre-4.2 Ultrix, you can not use more than 2^21 sectors in any given drive. The Ultrix SCSI drivers use a command set that has sector numbers modulo 2^21; if you use more than 2^21, you will e.g., over-write the superblock or things in the lower portion of your disk. This is bad. Ultrix 4.2 allegedly fixes this scsi driver. They may have a limitation of 2^21 sectors per partition, I dunno. Dirk Grunwald -- Univ. of Colorado at Boulder (grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu) (grunwald@cs.colorado.edu)
moss@cs.umass.edu (Eliot Moss) (06/11/91)
Actually, my understanding was that the the problem had to do with low level sector numbering in the SCSI commands (only enough bits to talk about 2 million sectors = 1 billion bytes (at 512 bytes/sector)), so partition size would probably not help. If the problem is inodes or something, then limiting partition size should help ... Eliot Moss -- J. Eliot B. Moss, Assistant Professor Department of Computer and Information Science Lederle Graduate Research Center University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax); Moss@cs.umass.edu
alan@shodha.enet.dec.com ( Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.) (06/14/91)
The problem was that you could not safely reference more than 2^21 LBNs. Since most LBNs are 512 bytes, that works out to 1 GB. It didn't matter how it was partitioned. This problem has been fixed in ULTRIX V4.2. -- Alan Rollow alan@nabeth.cxn.dec.com