Re: File sizes

["Matthew Gillen" <user=50@nabble.blu.org>]

 Scott Ehrlich wrote: 
> What is the maximum file size permitted by Linux? 
> 
> That is obviously a generic question - 
> 
> - There is likely a BIOS limitation 

The BIOS doesn't know anything about files or filesystems, so I doubt it. 
Your controller may have 32 or 64 bit registers, but that would only affect 
transfer speed.  So it shouldn't matter what your BIOS or hard-drive hardware are. 

> - 32 vs 64 bit 

It certainly makes a difference whether you have a 64-bit-capable CPU and kernel. 

> - How about EXT2 vs EXT3? 
> 
> I performed some googling, but I didn't find any obvious hits based on 
> the above scenarios. 
> 

There's a fun (and quick) way to test things yourself if you've got a 
particular system you want to test out without waiting for 4+ TB of data to 
actually be written to the disk.  You can create a huge file that doesn't 
actually take much space (a sparse file). Basically you do this: 
  dd if=/dev/zero of=big_file bs=1024 count=1 seek=1073741824 
to get a 1.1TB file. 

If you do larger numbers, you'll eventually get messages like this: 
 dd: truncating at 4171511627776 bytes in output file `big_file': File too large 

That will tell you what the filesystem/kernel support as the max file size. 
The ext2/3 developers used this trick to test 64-bit support: 
http://osdir.com/ml/file-systems.ext2.devel/2005-06/msg00038.html

Have fun, 
Matt 

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