IDE vs SCSI drives

Kevin Buettner kev@primenet.com
Thu, 19 Oct 2000 23:38:21 -0700


On Oct 19,  9:31pm, der.hans wrote:

> Am 19. Oct, 2000 schwäzte Jason so:
> 
> > On another note, why exactly is it that a 32bit system limits one to
> > 2GB files, rather than 4GB files? Whos bright idea was it to use a
> > signed integer rather than an unsigned one to point to a location in a
> > file, anyways?
> 
> I thought the 2GB hurdle was surpassed? Maybe it's an ext3 or extended
> ext2 thing. I don't have any 2GB files, so I haven't paid attention :).

I'm not sure.  I thought there was still a 2GB limit for ext2, but I'm
looking at fs/ext2/file.c in the 2.4.0-test9 kernel and it appears
that the limit depends upon the block size.  I haven't looked at it
closely enough yet to puzzle out the relationship though.

> In any case, for Kevin's tests, would it matter if he just copied 10 1GB
> files vs. one 10GB file?

I found this recently while poking around...

  http://www.doclib.org/Linux/system/benchmark/bonnie-big/

It gets around the 2GB limit for 32 bit systems by creating
multiple files exactly as you suggest.