(posted to the freebsd-fs mailing list this afternoon)
Subject: It's 2008. 1 TB disk drives cost $160. Quotas are 32-bit.
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.
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