[ale] Kernel 2.4 Released

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 09:25:55AM -0500, Bob Kruger wrote:
> Richard Storey wrote:

> > IT's out.

> I haven't been keeping up with the development notes.

> Does this new kernel break the 2 Gig file limitation in Linux?

	That was "fixed" in the kernel and the ext2 file system a long
time ago.  Now it's more or less an issue of the libraries and applications
using appropriate calls which can support them.  I'm not sure if that was
backported into the 2.2.x kernels or not.  IIRC, I think it was.

	Big problem always was "lseek()" which required a "long" for the
seek parameter.  That broke at 2 Gig.  Anything else using or returning a
long for a file position indicator was broken.  Applications supporting
long files (>2Gig) need to use calls like lseek64 and open64 to support
long-long (64 bit) file position pointers.  Then your limit is something
like 4 TB.

	Basically, earlier distros are going to be broken, no matter what
kernel you use.  Newer distro's MIGHT be OK, but I don't know how to
tell for sure.  I would love to see a comparision chart between which
distros have updated libraries to support long-long file positions and
files larger than 2 Gig.  I think glibc 2.1 is required but I'm not
exactly certain.

> Regards - Bob Kruger
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	Mike
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