Leading items and editorials

I guess it is just more carefully papering over the existing problems

MODULE_LICENSE
htpasswd
/tmp
MODULE_LICENSE
    MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");

insmod
/proc/sys/kernel/tainted
BLKGETSIZE64
pci64_
dma_addr_t
pci_dac_
From:	 Torsten Howard <torsten@inetw.net>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: SourceForge
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:33:16 -0500

Dear Editor:

I read with some concern your subtopic, " VA Linux goes proprietary?"

It is a critical failure to concenctrate too much power in the
hands of a few.  Good systems are engineered without such a single
point of failure.  Politics has usurped power from dictators.  Microsoft
has bore the condemnation of the courts for abuse of its power.

And thus the saying, "Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts
absolutely."  Dr. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same 
thing over and over, and expecting different results each time. 

At some point, I begin to wonder.  Exactly when do we learn from
the mistakes past?  From the politics of GPL radicals, one would 
take a look and realize there is a huge concentration of power in the
sourceforge website.  The same company owns two of the most visible
advocacy sights, Freshmeat and Slashdot.org.

In addition, sourceforge is abusing their power.  Let me explain.
When I download non-sourceforge GPL software and wish
to communicate to the author or mailing lists, I do so.

Sourceforge has hidden all communication to its projects behind
a "login."  It is the attempt to control communication, mailing lists,
and access to emails which is an abuse of power.  It is this very 
communication which is the lifeblood of open-source contributive 
projects.   Now we see the insanity of repetition, and failure to
change the way things are done.

We have not learned that concentrating power is a poor choice.

So what does this topic have to do with SourceForge.net adding
proprietary extensions?  Only that they have the power to do so - 
the power to undermine the ideas upon which they stand without 
falling over - because nobody is pushing.

And one final quote - "Power concedes nothing without demand."

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Torsten Howard

From:	 Michael Carniello <mlcarn1@home.com>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: VA Linux
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 21:18:32 -0500

To The Editor,

Your recent piece on VA Linux (8/30/2001) was interesting, as most of your
leading items are ... and it reflects a fact which you and most of this
community truly believe, yet with a strange duality, fail to recognize. And
that fact, reflected in a quote from your article, is this: "VA is ... just
finding a way to more readily sell its free software..."

Somebody may think of a clever of selling free stuff in the future, but it
hasn't worked in the past. I'm not saying that free software isn't good or
right, I'm saying that (right now, with current business models), it's
impossible to make money off that which can be had for free.

Mike Carniello
mlcarn1@home.com

From:	 "jacob navia" <jacob@jacob.remcomp.fr>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Selling free software
Date:	 Sat, 1 Sep 2001 14:04:17 +0200

Dear Sir:
I would like to point you to this sentence in your magazine:

"According to Eric, VA is not changing its focus as an open source company in
any way, it's just finding a way to more readily sell its free software"

Excuse me but if it's free of charge it can't be sold, and if it is sold, int
can't be free of charge. I am sorry but I think logic should at least play a
part in this discussion. VA Linux is beginning to fail financially, because
there is no way around logic, no matter how many lengthy explanations you come
up with.

Yours sincerely

---
Jacob Navia Logiciels/informatique
41 rue Maurice Ravel
93430 Villetaneuse
France

From:	 Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: LNX-BBC and LBT
Date:	 Wed, 29 Aug 2001 23:57:57 -0700

Thanks for the nice review of the LNX-BBC project!  We've also enjoyed
the reaction from people at LinuxWorld who came by to pick up copies.

Your article says that Linuxcare is no longer developing a bootable CD
project.  Although we thought that might be the case when we sent our CD
to press, it turns out that Linuxcare has done a new version of their
project, now called LBT (Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox).  They have been
giving these out at LinuxWorld; that means there are now two maintained
projects derived from the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, their
project

http://lbt.linuxcare.com/

and our project

http://www.lnx-bbc.org/

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> | Its really terrible when FBI arrested
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | hacker, who visited USA with peacefull
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF) | mission -- to share his knowledge with
     http://www.freesklyarov.org/      | american nation.  (Ilya V. Vasilyev)

From:	 "Toni SOUEID" <djt2000@inco.com.lb>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Fighting the DMCA and the Like.
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 18:04:13 +0200

Dear reader,

It is with sorrow and anger that I read the news about Dmitry Slyarov's
case.  What a shame for all of us if researchers and developers will begin
to be threatened just for writing a good paper or publishing a good piece
of software.  Some of us think the DMCA is good (especially governments and
big corporations) and some think is it bad.  Those who think it is good are
enforcing it by every mean imaginable.

So what can we do, we who think the DMCA is bad ?  The answer is pretty
simple. Fighting fire with fire. Fighting law with law.  We all need to get
involved in Free/Open Source software and/or in Free/Open Content
documentation movements.  While donating money for such initiatives is fine
and necessary it is not enough.  Contributions should be made by writing,
using and reviewing such software and documentation.  People should be
educated about the GPL, the FDL, the OPL and other similar licenses. They
should also be encouraged to use such licenses.  Who will need to buy
copyrighted material protected by a restrictive license when Free
alternatives exist ?  If just everyone of use could write a little piece of
software or a little piece of documentation in one of his areas of
interest, and release it under Free/Open licenses we could build a huge
alternative library of software and documentation that could benefit all of
Humanity and at the same time protect it's rights.

I've decided to release all of my own written tutorials under the OPL and
all of my own written software under the GPL to help protest against what's
happening out there.  On another hand I've decided to erase every piece of
proprietary file formats from my website and replace them with standards
compliant ones.

Can you do the same ?

Toni SOUEID,
Beirut - LEBANON.

From:	 rjh@world.std.com
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Financial customers are not conservative
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 15:30:55 -0400 (EDT)

The financial marketplace is "conservative" in their financial
attitudes, not their computer purchasing.  They have long been Unix
strongholds.  Sun workstations, Thinking Machine supers, and other
leading edge hardware has a long history of penetration of these
financial markets.  The IBM sale to SIAC is signficant for Linux, not
for the Unix family.  Several major stock market functions are Unix
based.  More than 10% of the world stock settlements traffic has gone
through SCO Unix based systems for several years.

So while the SIAC sale is important and worth publicizing, do not read
too much into it.

R Horn

From:	 Vulture <t.sippel-dau@ic.ac.uk>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Terabyte disks and Linux kernels
Date:	 Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:51:11 +0100

Hello,

some weeks ago I got my sweaty palms on one of the Barracuda-180 disks
and fitted it into a system. However, I see a problem lurking on the 
horizon: SCSI commands have a 32 bit block address in the command, and 
can be formatted for blocks of size of any power of 2 bits, up to 2**35. 
However, Linux systems (and many others) have so far used "sector" sizes 
of 4096 bit (512 bytes), and aggregated these into "blocks", typically
2, 8, or 16 sectors per block.

File systems and paging work in these block sizes, but at the device 
driver level it will go down to the smaller sectors again.

Now 4 billion blocks times 4000 bit gives 16 Tb or two Terabytes, and 
that is only 12 times as big is as currently available disks, and will 
probably be surpassed in 4 years or so. We could start making the 
sectors bigger, up to 32 kb (8 kilobytes) for 64 bit systems with an
8 kilobyte page size, but how many disks will take kindly to a format-unit
command specifying anything but 4096 bit blocks is anybodies guess.

Disk manufacturers could also start to subdivide their disks into up to
8 "logical units" for another 4 year's leeway or so. However, it might
be a good idea to start thinking now about that particular limit and
how to handle it in the kernel. A quick Google search yielded many articles
on "Terabytes", but I found none that discussed it as a problematic limit.

N.B. IDE drives have their next limit at 137 Gigabytes (according to 
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q114/8/41.ASP), which
should become a problem in weeks rather than months. 

                                Thomas

*   Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ?
*
*   email: cmaae47 @ imperial.ac.uk
*   voice: +4420-7594-6912 (day)
*   fax:   +4420-7594-6958
*   snail: Thomas Sippel - Dau
*          Linux Services Manager
*          Customer Relations Group
*          Information and Communication Technology
*          Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
*          Exhibition Road
*          Kensington SW7 2BX
*          Great Britain

Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters See also: last week's Development page.	Development projects News and Editorials Red Hat's Embedded Linux Developer Suite. Following a relatively quiet week at LinuxWorld, Red Hat announced a new offering this week: the Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer Suite. The suite includes an embedded version of Red Hat Linux, the gcc cross-development tool suite, an embedded boot loader, and the usual set of associated services. Support is provided for several processors. Red Hat recently announced a number of other initiatives including an e-commerce offering and a PostgreSQL based database package. But their foray into the embedded Linux marketplace, ignoring their eCOS alternative, has been rather minimal up to this point. Red Hat has supported the tools essential to embedded work (i.e. gcc, binutils, and glibc), but as avoided the creation of its own embedded distribution. One of the few bright spots of late for computing has been the embedded space, which Linux vendors have nearly saturated. Vendors such as MontaVista, Lineo, LynuxWorks and RidgeRun already market Linux based distributions for embedded systems. The question is whether Red Hat can use it's relatively well known name to power its way into a growing but well seeded arena. Red Hat's advantages, of course, are its long experience (by way of Cygnus) and its high-profile name. Given those, the company may just be able to muscle its way into the embedded distribution market, despite a late start. Research Triangle Park, N.C. based Red Hat is expected to ship the new embedded product sometime in October. Mozilla leader laid off from Netscape. Mitchell Baker, lead wrangler of Mozilla.org, was laid off last Thursday from Netscape (or rather AOL's Netscape Division). Her personal notice to the Mozilla project members states that while she is no longer with Netscape, she intends to remain active with the Mozilla project. There have been unconfirmed reports that this may be have been part of a larger layoff, which spawned rumors that it was all part of Netscape's earlier announcements stating that company's intent to exit the browser market. However, as of press time, LWN.net has been unable to confirm the larger layoff reports. A brief notice was posted to Bugzilla noting Baker's departure, but there has been little added discussion there. Users of Bugzilla have requested that visitors not burden the server looking for what isn't there. The story didn't escape Slashdot's faithful. One feedback post says Baker was fired from Netscape, though Mitchell's own account says her position was eliminated. Requests for comments on this situation from various Netscape and Mozilla members has produced no additional information as yet, though we're still looking into the matter. It should be pointed out - though it shouldn't need to be - that even if AOL/Netscape were to completely eliminate all staff actively working on Mozilla, the project wouldn't die. Therein lies the beauty of open source. The company need not continue the financial burden of such a project, but the project need not be held hostage to corporate whims or economic downturns. Well wishes go out to Baker and any other ex-Netscape Mozilla contributors with hopes that they'll land on their feet in short order. LSB Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 2.2 test suite. The LSB Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 2.2 test suite is now available. The FHS, of course, specifies where files should be located in a Linux distribution as part of the Linux Standard Base. This test suite may be used to verify a distribution's compliance with version 2.2 of the FHS. Embedded Systems A walk on the embedded side . . . of LinuxWorld SF 2001 (LinuxDevices.com). Rick Lehrbaum of LinuxDevices.com says embedded Linux is on the rise as he takes a walk on the embedded side of LinuxWorld. "In the past, Embedded Linux products and technologies accounted for roughly 10 percent of what was showcased at LinuxWorld. At this show, the Embedded Linux fraction seems to have increased to around 15-20 percent. Not surprising, given the strong growth in developer interest in Embedded Linux reported in recent months by market analysts VDC (story), Evans Data Corp (story), and others (story)." Databases NuSphere MySQL (Unix Review). Unix Review reviews NuSphere MySQL. "All in all, I'm disappointed that NuSphere did not do a better job of documenting their product. Remember, most of the software included in NuSphere MySQL is freely available. What a user is really paying for is convenience, information and support." MiniSQL updates. MiniSQL, known more commonly as mSQL, has had a couple of new releases this past week. The first is the last stable release of the 2.0 series, version 2.0.12. This release fixes a security problem with the w3-auth access control. Also this week, the third beta release for the new 3.0 version was announced. Database Gorilla Hunter (TechWeb). TechWeb reviews PostgreSQL 7.1 from GreatBridge. "If your business has hefty database requirements, it's hard to imagine an open-source option that's a true alternative to the established commercial database engines. Great Bridge, however, brings software, service and support together in a product that can be safely considered for many smaller organizations or apps." phpMyAdmin 2.2.0 released. phpMyAdmin 2.2.0, a web administration tool for MySQL, has been released. There are security fixes in this release, so an upgrade is recommended; there's also a long list of new features. Education Seul/EDU Linux in Education Report. The Seul/EDU Linux in Education Report for September 3 is out; this issue has a strong emphasis on putting Linux systems in schools, and delves into the question of whether an education-specific distribution is called for. Why should open source software be used in schools?. LinuxMedNews pointed us to an article on why open source software should be used for general education. "Students should, at least, be given the opportunity to see how their new tools work. They should be given the opportunity to examine the inner workings of software. They should be given the opportunity to extend the functions of their tools, where they see or imagine possibilities. They should not be held back by locking the toolbox of the Information Age and told they must not peer inside, must not try to discover how it works, must not share their tools with others, must not use their tools without paying proper tribute to the software overlords, under penalty and punishment of law." Plenty of links are used to back up the arguments here, making this is a useful reference for educators working on Linux in the classroom projects. Electronics gerbv 0.0.2 and prerelease Savant. The gEDA site pointed out the releases of two early-stage projects: gerbv 0.0.2 and Savant. Printing Systems CUPS Book. A book on CUPS, published by SAMS and written by Easy Software Products founder Michael R. Sweet, is now available from the Easy Software website. Omni printer driver 0.4.2. Another release of the Omni printer driver has been made available from IBM's Linux Technology Center. This release was created to allow Omni to be used with the latest levels of Foomatic and printconf. Standards World Wide Web Consortium Issues SVG 1.0. W3 has issued the SVG 1.0 specification as a recommendation, meaning that the specification is stable, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favor its widespread adoption. Web-site Development Zope News for August 31. The Zope News for August 31, 2001 is out. It covers the Zope 2.4 beta release, a new ZEO beta release, the SecurityJihad project, Paul Everitt's new son, and more. Zope 2.4.1 released. Zope 2.4.1 has been released; it is primarily a bugfix release, which includes the recent security updates. Section Editor: Michael Hammel	September 6, 2001 Application Links GIMP Mozilla Galeon High Availability ht://Dig mnoGoSearch MagicPoint Wine Worldforge Zope Open Source Code Collections Berlios Freshmeat OpenSourceDirectory Savannah Le Serveur Libre SourceForge Sweetcode

	Programming Languages Lisp LISA 1.0 released. The official release of LISA 1.0 was announced this past week. LISA is a platform for the development of Rete-based intelligent systems in Common Lisp. The most significant new feature in Version 1.0 is full support for rule redefinition within a running inference engine. The full announcement can be found online. CMU CL CVS server move causes temporary service disruption. The CVS repository for CMU CL is being moved to a new server, which will keep the sources and binary distributions unavailable from their normal locations for a few weeks. Until then, backup repositories have been made available. PHP PHP Weekly Summary #52. This week's summary for PHP development includes talk of some new gettext additions, a fix for broken output buffering, and word of tighter Apache integration in future versions. Python Improving the social infrastructure of Python (developerWorks). Here's an article on Python documentation and distribution utilities on IBM's developerWorks site. "By way of background for any Python beginners reading this, Python has long had some semi-formal documentation standards. These standards have not attempted to constrain developers unduly, but rather to offer the 'one obvious way to do it.' Fortunately, Python developers, as a rule, have always been far better documenters than typical developers in other languages." This week's Python-URL. Here is a relatively thin Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for August 30, 2001. Topics include a look at WebWare, WebDAV module progress, a look at Tinter, and file locking issues. Tcl/Tk This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for August 31, with the latest from the Tcl/Tk development community. This issue looks at XML and XSL, tcl plugins, and new versions of e4graph, sgxTools, ActiveTcl, and moodss. Section Editor: Forrest Cook	Language Links Caml Caml Hump Tiny COBOL Erlang g95 Fortran Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) Gnu Compiler for the Java Language (GCJ) Guile Haskell IBM Java Zone Jython Free the X3J Thirteen (Lisp) Use Perl O'Reilly's perl.com Dr. Dobbs' Perl PHP PHP Weekly Summary Daily Python-URL Python.org Python.faqts Python Eggs Ruby Ruby Garden MIT Scheme Schemers Squeak Smalltalk Why Smalltalk Tcl Developer Xchange Tcl-tk.net O'Reilly's XML.com Regular Expressions

Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters See also: last week's Letters page.	Letters to the editor Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them.	September 6, 2001

From: Torsten Howard <torsten@inetw.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: SourceForge Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:33:16 -0500 Dear Editor: I read with some concern your subtopic, " VA Linux goes proprietary?" It is a critical failure to concenctrate too much power in the hands of a few. Good systems are engineered without such a single point of failure. Politics has usurped power from dictators. Microsoft has bore the condemnation of the courts for abuse of its power. And thus the saying, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Dr. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results each time. At some point, I begin to wonder. Exactly when do we learn from the mistakes past? From the politics of GPL radicals, one would take a look and realize there is a huge concentration of power in the sourceforge website. The same company owns two of the most visible advocacy sights, Freshmeat and Slashdot.org. In addition, sourceforge is abusing their power. Let me explain. When I download non-sourceforge GPL software and wish to communicate to the author or mailing lists, I do so. Sourceforge has hidden all communication to its projects behind a "login." It is the attempt to control communication, mailing lists, and access to emails which is an abuse of power. It is this very communication which is the lifeblood of open-source contributive projects. Now we see the insanity of repetition, and failure to change the way things are done. We have not learned that concentrating power is a poor choice. So what does this topic have to do with SourceForge.net adding proprietary extensions? Only that they have the power to do so - the power to undermine the ideas upon which they stand without falling over - because nobody is pushing. And one final quote - "Power concedes nothing without demand." Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Torsten Howard

From: Michael Carniello <mlcarn1@home.com> To: <letters@lwn.net> Subject: VA Linux Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 21:18:32 -0500 To The Editor, Your recent piece on VA Linux (8/30/2001) was interesting, as most of your leading items are ... and it reflects a fact which you and most of this community truly believe, yet with a strange duality, fail to recognize. And that fact, reflected in a quote from your article, is this: "VA is ... just finding a way to more readily sell its free software..." Somebody may think of a clever of selling free stuff in the future, but it hasn't worked in the past. I'm not saying that free software isn't good or right, I'm saying that (right now, with current business models), it's impossible to make money off that which can be had for free. Mike Carniello mlcarn1@home.com

From: "jacob navia" <jacob@jacob.remcomp.fr> To: <letters@lwn.net> Subject: Selling free software Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2001 14:04:17 +0200 Dear Sir: I would like to point you to this sentence in your magazine: "According to Eric, VA is not changing its focus as an open source company in any way, it's just finding a way to more readily sell its free software" Excuse me but if it's free of charge it can't be sold, and if it is sold, int can't be free of charge. I am sorry but I think logic should at least play a part in this discussion. VA Linux is beginning to fail financially, because there is no way around logic, no matter how many lengthy explanations you come up with. Yours sincerely --- Jacob Navia Logiciels/informatique 41 rue Maurice Ravel 93430 Villetaneuse France

From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: LNX-BBC and LBT Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 23:57:57 -0700 Thanks for the nice review of the LNX-BBC project! We've also enjoyed the reaction from people at LinuxWorld who came by to pick up copies. Your article says that Linuxcare is no longer developing a bootable CD project. Although we thought that might be the case when we sent our CD to press, it turns out that Linuxcare has done a new version of their project, now called LBT (Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox). They have been giving these out at LinuxWorld; that means there are now two maintained projects derived from the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, their project http://lbt.linuxcare.com/ and our project http://www.lnx-bbc.org/ -- Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> \| Its really terrible when FBI arrested Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ \| hacker, who visited USA with peacefull down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) \| mission -- to share his knowledge with http://www.freesklyarov.org/ \| american nation. (Ilya V. Vasilyev)

From: "Toni SOUEID" <djt2000@inco.com.lb> To: <letters@lwn.net> Subject: Fighting the DMCA and the Like. Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 18:04:13 +0200 Dear reader, It is with sorrow and anger that I read the news about Dmitry Slyarov's case. What a shame for all of us if researchers and developers will begin to be threatened just for writing a good paper or publishing a good piece of software. Some of us think the DMCA is good (especially governments and big corporations) and some think is it bad. Those who think it is good are enforcing it by every mean imaginable. So what can we do, we who think the DMCA is bad ? The answer is pretty simple. Fighting fire with fire. Fighting law with law. We all need to get involved in Free/Open Source software and/or in Free/Open Content documentation movements. While donating money for such initiatives is fine and necessary it is not enough. Contributions should be made by writing, using and reviewing such software and documentation. People should be educated about the GPL, the FDL, the OPL and other similar licenses. They should also be encouraged to use such licenses. Who will need to buy copyrighted material protected by a restrictive license when Free alternatives exist ? If just everyone of use could write a little piece of software or a little piece of documentation in one of his areas of interest, and release it under Free/Open licenses we could build a huge alternative library of software and documentation that could benefit all of Humanity and at the same time protect it's rights. I've decided to release all of my own written tutorials under the OPL and all of my own written software under the GPL to help protest against what's happening out there. On another hand I've decided to erase every piece of proprietary file formats from my website and replace them with standards compliant ones. Can you do the same ? Toni SOUEID, Beirut - LEBANON.

From: rjh@world.std.com To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Financial customers are not conservative Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 15:30:55 -0400 (EDT) The financial marketplace is "conservative" in their financial attitudes, not their computer purchasing. They have long been Unix strongholds. Sun workstations, Thinking Machine supers, and other leading edge hardware has a long history of penetration of these financial markets. The IBM sale to SIAC is signficant for Linux, not for the Unix family. Several major stock market functions are Unix based. More than 10% of the world stock settlements traffic has gone through SCO Unix based systems for several years. So while the SIAC sale is important and worth publicizing, do not read too much into it. R Horn

From: Vulture <t.sippel-dau@ic.ac.uk> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Terabyte disks and Linux kernels Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:51:11 +0100 Hello, some weeks ago I got my sweaty palms on one of the Barracuda-180 disks and fitted it into a system. However, I see a problem lurking on the horizon: SCSI commands have a 32 bit block address in the command, and can be formatted for blocks of size of any power of 2 bits, up to 2*35. However, Linux systems (and many others) have so far used "sector" sizes of 4096 bit (512 bytes), and aggregated these into "blocks", typically 2, 8, or 16 sectors per block. File systems and paging work in these block sizes, but at the device driver level it will go down to the smaller sectors again. Now 4 billion blocks times 4000 bit gives 16 Tb or two Terabytes, and that is only 12 times as big is as currently available disks, and will probably be surpassed in 4 years or so. We could start making the sectors bigger, up to 32 kb (8 kilobytes) for 64 bit systems with an 8 kilobyte page size, but how many disks will take kindly to a format-unit command specifying anything but 4096 bit blocks is anybodies guess. Disk manufacturers could also start to subdivide their disks into up to 8 "logical units" for another 4 year's leeway or so. However, it might be a good idea to start thinking now about that particular limit and how to handle it in the kernel. A quick Google search yielded many articles on "Terabytes", but I found none that discussed it as a problematic limit. N.B. IDE drives have their next limit at 137 Gigabytes (according to http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q114/8/41.ASP), which should become a problem in weeks rather than months. Thomas Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ? * * email: cmaae47 @ imperial.ac.uk * voice: +4420-7594-6912 (day) * fax: +4420-7594-6958 * snail: Thomas Sippel - Dau * Linux Services Manager * Customer Relations Group * Information and Communication Technology * Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine * Exhibition Road * Kensington SW7 2BX * Great Britain

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