Re: [LI] Large disks

[Babu Kalakrishnan <kalakrishnan@xxxxxxxx>]

Rohit,

>
>On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Rohit wrote:
>
>> Atul Chitnis wrote:

>> Ghrrr! I want you to provide fundaes on what are the limiting factors
>> when it comes to having a maximum file size and partitio size nd how are
>> these related to FAT length in BITs. Go ahead, make my day.
>
>I have no fundas. The only one I have before me is the fact that I have
>installed Linux on 6-8 GB partitions without sweat. And I believe your
>question has already been answered by someone else - there is a 2 GB
>*FILE* size limit in Linux. It does not apply to partitions or
>filesystems.
>

The maximum size of a file under e2fs should be 4GB not 2GB (32 bit
unsigned int) 

The ext2_super_block structure defines the No. of blocks in the filesystem as :

__u32	s_blocks_count /* blocks count */

and the maximum size of a block is defined as 

#define EXT2_MAX_BLOCK_SIZE 4096

This should give a maximum theoretical size of the filesystem as 4GB *
4096, which is about 16 terabytes.

There may be other limits which force this limit to be lower. (The only
document I've so far looked at is the header file
/usr/src/linux/include/linux/ex2_fs.h )


>As far as I know, FAT is the only filesystem that has an issue with large
>partitions because of the static nature of the File Allocation Table.
>Inodes in the *nix file systems don't have that problem.
>
The number of inodes are also limited to 2 power 32 !! :-) (Same as the
maximum number of clusters under FAT32 ??)


Kala
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