The issue is that, for years, the basic APIs for fileaccess was based on a signed long int for file offset, limiting files to 2GB. When 40MB, or even 400MB hard drives were common, this wasn't a big issue. When 4GB hard drives, and larger, started to become prevalent, workarounds had to be devised. Less efficient, since 64bit values aren't a basic type. Also, programs had to be reviewed and revised to ensure that file offsets weren't being done in 32 bit integers. Of course, for many programs, it was just a special recompile against a new glibc. For instance, if all you do is read sequentially, there probably isn't a problem. -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Michael Schwendt Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 5:02 PM To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: 2 Gb File Size Limit ? On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 18:37:16 -0700, Shashi Bhusan Patra wrote: > Kevin Krieser wrote: > > >But do you have any files over 4 GB? > > > > > oh you mean any file whose size is 4GB+ ?? NO, certainly not. that is > not directly possible on a 32 bit system. That's a wrong assumption. 32-bit CPU registers do not imply that you could not implement 64-bit (or larger) file seek pointers. The limitation is the file-system implementation. See bottom of the following page about an overview of current Linux filesystems: http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html --
