#### "The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

# The Answer Guy

#### By James T. Dennis, linux-questions-only@ssc.com
LinuxCare, http://www.linuxcare.com/

### Maximum Filesize vs. Maximum Filesystem Size

From Charlie Romero on the Linux PPC mailing list on Thu, 27 May 1999

I'm a little confused on the 2 GB thing. Is it ok to have each partition ie. `/usr` , `/etc`, `/home` at 2GB each or can the whole file system not exceed 2 GB.

If I have a 10 GB drive, is this ok.

`/usr` 2GB `/etc` 2GB `/opt` 2GB `/home` 2GB `/swap` 2GB

or do I have to keep the total under 2GB?

Thanks, Charlie

> Actually 2Gb is the maximum FILESIZE under 32-bit versions of Linux. (Alpha, and presumably UltraSPARC ports are not hampered by this).

> Linux ext2 filesystems can be much larger than 2Gb --- and can be much larger than any available consumer hard drives or common arrays (although the lack of journaling/logging means that fsck may take a prohibitively long time on larger filesystems).

[ From what I've seen 127 MB is the maximum size of a swap partition, although nothing keeps you from having more than one of them, or using swap files also. "Linux Native" and "Linux Swap" are different partition types. -- Heather]

##### Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 42 June 1999

###### HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Techinical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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