mo@bellcore.com (Mike O'Dell) (05/30/91)
To do that well, you really need to get "long long" into common compilers so you can do 64-bit arithmetic (long long was DMR's recommendation on how to do it). We look at doing that at Prisma, since we put long long into our compiler, but it sure breaks lots of things, not the least of which is binary compatibility with many things, an unacceptable implication. We finally did a cute hack which would allow filesystems to be larger than 2GB, but individual files could only be 2GB. This worked because the number of programs which actually deal with disk partitions is small and we owned them (in the sense we got to distribute them with the OS release), and they still worked fine on smaller filesystems. -Mike