David Clymer wrote:
On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 05:49, Micheal Mukherji wrote:My apologies if you feel its not a thing related to debian. Is the 'maximum file size' a constraint of a particular file system implementation or the constraint of operating system?Both, I believe. For example, 32bit versions of linux are limited to smaller filesizes than are 64bit versions.
This is no longer the case. Linux and glibc now have Large File Support (LFS), which allows 64-bit file sizes and offsets on 32-bit architectures.
> However, there are filesize
limits that are particular to filesystems as well - Resierfs has a maximum of 8TB^8 whereas fat32 has a maximum of 4GB (according to wikipedia). So its possible that a given filesystem could allow larger filesizes than the kernel can address or vis versa.
There are also compatibility constraints, both at the binary and the source level. Since Linux and glibc used to be limited to 32-bit file sizes on 32-bit architectures, they must continue to support programs compiled to use them. In addition, there is a concern to avoid data loss in software that stores file sizes in variables of 32-bit types (e.g. int or size_t), so programs compiled now will use the 32-bit system calls and library functions by default. So most programs are still limited to 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB - 1 byte) on 32-bit architectures even though they can theoretically use files up to 2^63-1 bytes in size.
Ben.