Large File Support

Many operating system were designed with restricted file size support when they were initially developed. As the disk capacity and the processing capacity increased, file sizes started growing resulting in files over the size of 2GB and 4GB's. So the Operating Systems which had initially not taken this growth into consideration had to separately provide facility for processing large files.

Large file support can be enabled for a file system while creating them or after creating them. While mounting a file system, there is an option to specify large file option which checks if the underlying file system has that support enabled or not.

There are options to switch between largefiles and nolargefiles. But if a file system has largefile support and has a large file, converting it to nolargefile will result in mount failure.

fsadm allows to specify laregfile support. An example for specifying laregfile option using fsadm in hp-ux,

root@Server1:/hroot# fsadm -F vxfs -o largefiles /base/files
root@Server1:/hroot# umount /base/files
root@Server1:/hroot# mount /base/files
root@Server1:/hroot# mount | grep /base/files
/base/files on /dev/vg_base/files ioerror=mwdisable,largefiles,delaylog,dev=402f0009 on Thu Jul 15 16:32:19 2010