I'm tring to configure my 2.4.x system to use files bigger that 2G... at the moment, the system i'm working on is running 2.4.8 kernel with glibc ver: 2.1.3-x (fs are all ext2), but i am trying to patch the kernel or upgrade it. So, far, i can't find a kernel option to enable to allow LFS support, nor can i get files > 2g to write. Am I missing something? Most of the docs i find have patches for 2.2.x kernels, but say nothing about 2.4.x except that it just works. ???

has anyone else tried this and got it to work? Any good

The block size used on EXT2 file systems will place an upper limit
on how large a file can actually be stored. The triple-indirection
scheme used in EXT2 will support the following sizes based on the
block size:

Block Size File Size

512 2 GB + epsilon
1k 16 GB + epsilon
2k 128 GB + epsilon
4k 1024 GB + epsilon
8k 8192 GB + epsilon ( not without PAGE_SIZE >= 8 kB )

You cannot use an 8K block size on Intel since the page size on Intel
platforms is 4K, so the file size is limited to 1TB + epsilon, and the
4K block size is probably the best choice.

Additionally, the basic block device layer can support only 4G of 512
byte regions, 2G to be safe, so don't expect to be able to access more
than 1TB of actual data total in the EXT2 filesystem.
Sparse files can have maximum offsets according to the table above,
because blocks are not allocated for blocks that have not been written.

you can use fdisk to check the size of your blocks

this info was pretty old but I guess it applies in some cases

using tune2fs, i was able to determine that all my large drives have 4k block sizes.. still no luck with > 2G files.

Check out this thread .