Ext2 File system limitation

This is a very common question. Many people have problems with the partition limit on Ext2 filesystems being very small by current standards. It feels smaller all the time as people have larger disks and often larger filesystems. It's worth mentioning that 64-bit machines (ia64, alpha) will not have this limitation.

Note that, while the official CVS sources still suffer of this problem, recent (as of 2007) Debian GNU Hurd distributions do not have this limit anymore. Be happy. July 2007 from debian-hurd

• From the Hurd FAQ: partition limit

Patch:

Release candidate 1 of the patch is uploaded in Savannah.

Useful:

Discussions on status and how to fix the problem:

• Febuary 2003
• December 2002
• March 2002 status and a follow up
• Nov 2001 status

Maybe Useful:

• http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernel-doc/1999-03/msg00001.html (This link is broken. Have been unable to fix it. ?MauriceMcCarthy 2 Nov 2004.)
• http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2000-March/008708.html

(Searching Beowulf for '2Gb patch' seems to show this still present in the archive but somehow it is not accessible.)