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Maximum Filesize vs. Maximum Filesystem Size

From Charlie Romero on the Linux PPC mailing list on Thu, 27 May 1999

I'm a little confused on the 2 GB thing. Is it ok to have each partition ie. /usr , /etc, /home at 2GB each or can the whole file system not exceed 2 GB.

If I have a 10 GB drive, is this ok.

/usr 2GB /etc 2GB /opt 2GB /home 2GB /swap 2GB

or do I have to keep the total under 2GB?

Thanks, Charlie

Actually 2Gb is the maximum FILESIZE under 32-bit versions of Linux. (Alpha, and presumably UltraSPARC ports are not hampered by this).

Linux ext2 filesystems can be much larger than 2Gb --- and can be much larger than any available consumer hard drives or common arrays (although the lack of journaling/logging means that fsck may take a prohibitively long time on larger filesystems).

[ From what I've seen 127 MB is the maximum size of a swap partition, although nothing keeps you from having more than one of them, or using swap files also. "Linux Native" and "Linux Swap" are different partition types. -- Heather]

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 42 June 1999

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