"We almost forgot to mention this, but Linux recently
became the first desktop OS to support enormously large file sizes.
How large?
144 Petabytes, or 144,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A Petabyte is
roughly a thousand Terabytes, with a Terabyte being roughly a
thousand Gigabytes, of course.
This came up in conversation when we were chatting to Andre
Hedrick, who looks after the Linux IDE subsystem, in our story
about Mount Rainier CDs last week. Hedrick's code exploits
extensions to the ATA-133 spec, which uses 48-bit rather than
28-bit addressing. The drivers are included in the 2.4.13-ac6
kernel tree, says Andre, or alternatively you can download them
from his site."
