[Fedora] Sendmail's 2GiB limit?

[Les Mikesell]

James Wilkinson wrote:

>> A better question is why is there still anything with a 2 gig file
>> size limit?  Or why was there ever one in Linux, given that unix
>> should have already been going through the pain of conversion by the
>> time Linux distributions were being built?
> 
> When Linux distributions were first being built, the filesystem had a
> 64 MB limit. That's for the entire filesystem...

I would hope everyone involved knew that would be a temporary limitation 
and that imposing any particular filesystem's limits on the kernel would 
be short sighted.  Now 2 gigs is a dollars's worth of disk space.

> As for why there are still 2 gig limits -- for one thing, if you're
> going to memory map a file, and use memory operations to read and write
> the file, and you're using a 32 bit computer, then the 2 gig limit comes
> with the territory.  Memory-mapping files is a very useful technique,
> and using 64-bit file accesses is inherently much slower on a 32 bit
> processor (and it matters with memory-mapped files).

But that shouldn't limit your file size - and doesn't anymore for nearly 
everything.

> The other main reason (and the one I suspect applies here) is that it's
> not considered worth the complexity: not worth paying the real price of
> extra complexity to be able to handle large files to get the theoretical
> benefit of having log files over 2 GB on 32 bit systems.

The benefit isn't theoretical if you have more than 2 gigs of data. I 
thought the default now was to compile with large file support and had 
been for some time.  Does that mean someone intentionally is still 
imposing tiny limits or that parts of the system haven't been rebuilt 
for ages?  I've had another program or two croak when hitting this no 
longer relevant limit.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com