On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, "Marlier, Ian"
Any number of filesystems have a 2GB limit on filesize (and it can cause big big issues at times!). A default install of (for example) SuSE 9.1 -- just a couple of years back -- used a version of ext2/3 as its default FS, and that was susceptible to this condition.
I've yet to see a version of ext2/ext3 that had a 2GB limit, and if the version of ext2/ext3 shipped with 9.1 really did have this limitation, it was a very large step backwards from that supplied with 9.0[0]: davjam@dav2:~> cat /etc/SuSE-release SuSE Linux 9.0 (i586) VERSION = 9.0 davjam@dav2:~> df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda11 1929068 788312 1042764 44% / /dev/hda1 31077 9333 20140 32% /boot /dev/hda5 1929068 54896 1776180 3% /root /dev/hda6 3850292 890772 2763932 25% /home /dev/hda7 9621848 4266156 4866916 47% /suse /dev/hda8 489992 12365 452327 3% /tmp /dev/hda10 3850292 78156 3576548 3% /srv /dev/hda12 3850292 1312932 2341772 36% /opt /dev/hda13 8657308 3396544 4820988 42% /usr /dev/hda15 1312368 225212 1020488 19% /var/lib /dev/hda9 489992 268548 196144 58% /var/log /dev/hda14 38456308 691712 35811096 2% /media/backups tmpfs 150200 0 150200 0% /dev/shm davjam@dav2:~> sudo grep /media/backups /etc/fstab Password: /dev/hda14 /media/backups ext3 noexec 1 1 davjam@dav2:~> dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/backups/blank.file count=4100 bs=1M 4100+0 records in 4100+0 records out davjam@dav2:~> ls -l /media/backups/blank.file -rw-rw-r-- 1 davjam users 4299161600 2006-09-21 02:12 /media/backups/blank.file davjam@dav2:~> ls -lh /media/backups/blank.file -rw-rw-r-- 1 davjam users 4.1G 2006-09-21 02:12 /media/backups/blank.file Since the above blank file is 4,100MiB, created on an ext3 file-system, using SuSE 9.0, I doubt 9.1 would be unable to create a similar sized file.
I'm assuming that reiser isn't vulnerable, and that the newer ext2/ext3 versions in later releases aren't, but haven't tried to find out :-)
Reiser, ext2, ext3 are all capable of creating much larger files than 2GB. I was building the DVD ISOs for 10.0 and 10.1 during testing on a 9.0 machine. Now they're usually built on a 10.0 machine, still using ext3, and not once have I have a problem building the roughly 3.3GB ISO. [0] I'd actually perform the same test on a 9.1 machine but the only partition that has more than 2GB free space is also the one that holds a local copy of the 9.1 DVD, is mounted read-only, and would require me being root to do the testing. Unfortunately, due to the age of the machine in question, and it being a laptop with a slow IDE bus, I don't feel safe leaving it with a root console open while it does the exact same test. Regards, David Bolt -- Member of Team Acorn checking nodes at 50 Mnodes/s: http://www.distributed.net/ AMD1800 1Gb WinXP/SUSE 9.3 | AMD2400 256Mb SuSE 9.0 | A3010 4Mb RISCOS 3.11 AMD2400(32) 768Mb SUSE 10.0 | Falcon 14Mb TOS 4.02 | A4000 4Mb RISCOS 3.11 AMD2600(64) 512Mb SUSE 10.0 | | RPC600 129Mb RISCOS 3.6