File size limits 2

[Drej]

Quick question regarding Red Hat 9.0, which applies to all Linux/Unix systems (I suppose). Why is it that I am hitting a limit of 2Gb for file size? Is there any way of increasing this or a workaround? I am using Linux to do some big calculations which create these huge file sizes. When I run the equivalent calculations in windows, the file size reaches 4.5Gb and the calculations finish fine, whereas in Linux the program falls over whenever the file size reaches 2Gb.

Many thanks.

 

[revdode]

I think you may be using the 2.4 kernel, from memory this only supports 2Gb although there were some patches to allow large file support. I believe 2.6 has support for large files, although I think it may still be a compile time option. Maybe a search through redhats support pages would indicate how to go about enabling this - it may involve comiling your own kernel which is always fun.

A search for linux and large file support on google should turn up the details - the following link has some background.

http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html

Another possibility is your application or the libraries that it uses may only support 2Gb files?

 

[nazariosr]

Drej,
I had a similar problem running into a filesize limit and here is what I found:
1. fat, jffs, jffs2 and romfs only support 2Gb or 4 Gb
2. ext2, ext3, reinsferfs do not specify a max filesize (LFS)
3. jfs, xfs support large filesize
4. the standard linux filesystems support LFS (ext2,ext3, jfs, xfs, etc)
5. programs and libraries that link against GLIBC must be built with LFS
6. the problem might be the libraries that the software linked with.
RUN: "nm library | grep seek" and look for llseek or lseek64
If they are not used in the program then, the library was not built for LFS
Do the same for your application:
"nm myprogram | grep seek"
7. you could copy a 2 Gbyte file over and over again to verify that the OS supports LFS.

hope this helps.