Large Files

The large files project supports files that are larger than or equal to 2 Gbytes. Large-file semantics are supported on UFS, NFS, and CacheFS file systems. Applications will be able to create and access files up to

• One Tbyte on UFS-mounted file systems

• The limit of the NFS server for NFS- and CacheFS-mounted file systems

Existing file I/O interfaces have been modified to detect the error when they are used with a large file. New data types (most with suffixes of 64 or 64_t) and new interfaces (most with suffixes of 64) are provided to operate on large files.

An existing application running on Solaris 2.x software should be checked for the following points:

• To make the application large-file compatible (for example, "large-file safe in Solaris 2.6"), examine the application's source code to ensure that use of existing interfaces is appropriate and has the correct error-handling characteristics when a large file is encountered.

• For your application to work with large files (for example, "large-file aware"), you must examine and modify your source code. Examples for areas to modify include:

  • Output and in-memory formatting strings such as %ld to %ll

  • Any variable for temporary storage of sizes or offset information must be correctly sized to avoid truncation

  • Function parameters and return values should be checked and corrected if necessary.

For more information, see NFS Administration Guide and System Administration Guide.