Large File Support in Kernel 2.6

Andreas Baer
2005-09-08T19:25:14Z

I have a question about the Large File Support using Linux and glibc 2.3
on a 32-Bit machine. What's the correct limit for the file size and the
file system using LFS (just for the kernel, not to mention filesystem
limits etc)?

I found two references:

"The 2.6 kernel imposes its own limits on the size of files and file
systems handled by it. These are as follows:
- file size: On 32-bit systems, files may not exceed the size of 2 TB.
- file system size: File systems may be up to 2e73 bytes large. However,
this limit is still out of reach for the currently available hardware."

Source:
http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adminguide/html/apas04.html

"Kernel 2.6: For both 32-bit systems with option CONFIG_LBD set and for
64-bit systems: The size of a file system is limited to 2e73 (far too
much for today). On 32-bit systems (without CONFIG_LBD set) the size of
a file is limited to 2 TiB. Note that not all filesystems and hardware
drivers might handle such large filesystems."

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

I think it's 2TB for the file size and 2e73 for the file system, but I
don't understand the second reference and the part about the CONIFG_LBD.
What is exactly the CONFIG_LBD option?