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From: cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.large,comp.unix.aix
Subject: Re: Files > 4MB
Message-ID: <CEDMAN.90Nov10200403@lynx.ps.uci.edu>
Date: 11 Nov 90 04:04:02 GMT
References: <1008@intelisc.isc.intel.com> <1990Nov9.170337.9484@onion.pdx.com>
	<1990Nov10.190318.18938@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>
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In-reply-to: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu's message of 10 Nov 90 19:03:18 GMT

In article <1990Nov10.190318.18938@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy) writes:

   In <1990Nov9.170337.9484@onion.pdx.com> jeff@onion.pdx.com (Jeff Beadles) writes:

   >In <1008@intelisc.isc.intel.com> cfj@isc.intel.com (Charlie Johnson) writes:

   >>I'm curious if the companies who support Unix on large systems made the
   >>necessary file system changes to allow individual files which are larger 
   >>than 4 gigabytes ??  You'd have to at least stretch the file size in the
   >>inode beyond 32 bits and possibly mess around in the super block.  Any
   >>comments ??

   >Well, that would take one big disk :-)  Unix files can not span physical disk
   >partitions, at least on more common version of Unix. (Has anyone changed this?)

   Unless what I read recently is totally bogus, the latest version of AIX,
   the version that is on the new RS/6000 machines, has support for spanning
   filesystems across multiple disks.  It does this deep down in the kernal
   so that to filesystem sees the multiple disks as a single volume.  It
   actually has support for quite a few tricks including disk mirroring.
   How much of this is actually usable right now I don't know, but supposedly
   it does work.

Now this would be really funny. All versions of AIX I had the lack of
pleasure of having to use so far had quite the opposite problem:

        No files larger that 4 MBytes

Trting to transfer large files like e.g. the emacs source to port it
a.s.o. required me to place the archive on another nearby machine,
split it in 2, transfer the parts and the reassemble all files in
a directory on the Risc System 6000.

Possibly this has been fixed in the later releases. Having files span
filesystems won't do you much good unless you can use large files.

Note: AIX really isn't comp.unix.large, so I have changed the direction
of this thread to comp.unix.aix.

        Carl Edman


Theorectical Physicist,N.:A physicist whose  | Send mail
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