Re: [MiNT] Max file size

["Roger Burrows" <rfburrows@ymail.com>]

Hi Peter,
On 20 Aug 2010 at 14:33, Peter Slegg wrote:

> I have had this question answered before but no amount of googling
> finds the reply.
> 
> http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=ISO%2D8859%2D1&q=site%3Asparemint%2Eat
> ariforge%2Enet+partition
> 
> What is the max file size on Mint partitions ?
> 
> I have just upgraded to CD Writer Suite (DVD) and surprised to find that
> the maximum it can write to DVD is limited to 2 GByte by the os. The ext2
> docs suggest this could be bigger.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2
> 
As noted by many others earlier today, 2GB is the limit for the underlying 
Fwrite() system call (and associated file access calls).  Windows had the same 
problem and initially pushed it to 4GB-1 with a kludge, the major one being 
that the equivalent of Fseek() returned -1L on any error; other apparently 
negative long values returned were to be treated as unsigned positive file 
positions.  This of course was only useful for new/updated apps.

Sizes greater than 4GB require a new set of system calls, which is a fairly big 
job (and again obviously would only be useful for new/updated apps).  If such 
support does appear in MiNT, we'll update CD Writer Suite to use it!

As someone suggested, CDISO could support a .ISO file larger than 2GB without 
changes to the operating system by splitting it into multiple subfiles.  We'll 
consider it for an enhancement; yours is the first (indirect) request for this 
feature, probably because most users don't have an Ext2 filesystem handy.

Roger