On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 11:11:13AM -0400, Hall, Ken (IDS ECCS) wrote: > SLES8/EXT3 (formatted with -T largefile4) > > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5100758784 May 27 13:01 bigfile > > The caveat is that with EXT2 or EXT3, you have to specify "-T largefile4" > or the filesystem is created with 1k/inode. "largefile4" creates > 4MB/inode, which wastes considerable space on small files, but allows > files much larger than 2 gb.
The 'largefile4' option is a only tuning parameter which can be used to gain space efficiency on a filesystem which whose average file size will be large. It is NOT necessary in order to allow the creation of files larger than 2GB, and will cause many headaches if used inappropriately, since with a normal file size distribution, the filesystem will run out of inodes very quickly. ext2 and ext3 support large files "out of the box" given appropriate userland support (which will be found in any modern Linux distribution). -- - mdz
