large_file feature- where is it?

Darrell Michaud
Mon, 09 Jun 2003 18:47:28 -0000

I recently ran into an issue where I couldn't create a file larger than
2GB on a particular ext3 filesystem. I was under the (mistaken)
impression that >2GB support went in before ext3 support, and all ext3
filesystems would therefore support >2GB files on ia32.

So, I started poking around and found that some of my ext3 filesystems
have the "large_file" feature flag set on them, and others do not. I
cannot find a manpage for mke2fs anywhere that explains how to set this
flag, either at creation time or afterwards. When I try something like
"mke2fs -j -O large_file <dev>" mke2fs complains that it
doesn't
understand the argument. Attempts to create ext3 filesystems using a
modern debian-based (2.4.18) rescue CD also failed to set the large_file
flag.

So, I guess my question is, in what version of mke2fs was support for
large files implemented, and how do you enable it, if it's not the
default behavior?

Thanks,
D. Michaud