It's 2008. 1 TB disk drives cost $160. Quotas are 32-bit.

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 02:56:03PM -0700, John Kozubik wrote:
> I needed to set a user quota of greater than 2 TB today.  I failed,
> because FreeBSD does not have 64-bit quota tools.
> 
> I wasted a fair amount of time trying to track down what I assumed was my
> own user error.  Surely there is _no way_ that an enterprise operating
> system, in 2008, has 32-bit quotas.
> 
> Now I know better.
> 
> I am upset to find that several of my non-technical friends now have
> larger filesystems _in their living rooms_ than FreeBSD can handle with
> quotas.
> 
> Quotas are a long-standing, core piece of filesystem functionality and
> have been considered a bedrock of unix operating systems for decades.
> There is nothing new or experimental in moving quotas from 32 to 64 bit.
> 
> This is _as opposed to_ porting ZFS to FreeBSD, and gjournal, and every
> other shiny bauble that has monopolized freebsd-fs in the last four years.
> Those are new.  Those are experimental.
> 
> Apparently those take priority.
> 
> I don't have time to monitor the core pieces of FreeBSD to make sure _they
> still exist_.  Further, while I might have volunteered to help with the
> code back in 2004, when it took 5 hard drives to max out the usefulness of
> the filesystem, that's not how I'll be spending my time in 2008.
> 
> So I'll try this instead:
> 
> I will paypal $1000 to whoever can deliver fully clean 64-bit quotas
> and userland tools in FreeBSD by July 20, 2008.
> 
> That is, if you can tear yourself away from ZFS and whatever sexy SMP
> improvements you're building into FreeBSD 14.0 for a week.

John,

We don't use quotas here, but FWIW, I agree with you.  Additionally,
that 2GB limit should really be 4GB; someone likely used a signed number
instead of unsigned.

I'll take this project on (and there's no need for any monetary
exchange) if I can make heads or tails of the existing quota
infrastructure.  No promises, but I'll at least look into it.  I
definitely can't meet the July 20th deadline, sorry about that.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |