Problem creating filesystems (and othe operations) under 2.4.10

Problem creating filesystems (and othe operations) under 2.4.10

[quintaq]

Hello,

I am not subscribed to this list, so I would appreciate it if any replies
could be cc'd to me.

Is the following problem I have encountered symptomatic of a bug in 2.4.10?

I have just installed a Maxtor 30GB drive as /dev/hdc in my SuSE 7.0 system
which has a vanilla 2.4.10 kernel.  I found that I could write the
partition table and create a small ext2 partition for /boot plus 768MB of
swap.  Creation of the main ext2 filesystem on /hdc7 failed (before the
inode tables even began to be written), with "file size limit exceeded".
The same problem recurred every time I tried - and I did try various
combinations of partition size.  I see the same error message when trying
to change partition table flags.  The problem is identical using fdisk,
cfdisk and parted.  I have no file limits set in ulimit and I do not think
that this is the problem. 

I eventually put the same drive as /dev/hdc in another box running a stock
SuSE 2.2.16 kernel and creation of the filesystems completed without any
problem.  I have also verified this by booting this box using SuSE's 2.2.16
rescue kernel.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Geoff

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Re: Problem creating filesystems (and othe operations) under 2.4.10

[Alan Cox]

> I have just installed a Maxtor 30GB drive as /dev/hdc in my SuSE 7.0 system
> which has a vanilla 2.4.10 kernel.  I found that I could write the
> partition table and create a small ext2 partition for /boot plus 768MB of
> swap.  Creation of the main ext2 filesystem on /hdc7 failed (before the
> inode tables even began to be written), with "file size limit exceeded".
> The same problem recurred every time I tried - and I did try various
> combinations of partition size.  I see the same error message when trying
> to change partition table flags.  The problem is identical using fdisk,
> cfdisk and parted.  I have no file limits set in ulimit and I do not think
> that this is the problem. 
> 
> I eventually put the same drive as /dev/hdc in another box running a stock
> SuSE 2.2.16 kernel and creation of the filesystems completed without any
> problem.  I have also verified this by booting this box using SuSE's 2.2.16
> rescue kernel.
> 
> Any ideas?

Obvious one to check would be to see if when 2.4.10 acquired the page cache 
changes someone backed out the device picks up underlying file size limit bug 
fix that the -ac tree has and went to Linus.

It really sounds like that happened.

Alan