Large-file support (LFS) is the term frequently applied to the ability to create files larger than either 2 or 4 GiB on 32-bit filesystems.
Details
Traditionally, many operating systems and their underlying file system implementations used 32-bit integers to represent file sizes and positions. Consequently, no file could be larger than 2<sup>32</sup> − 1 bytes (4 GiB − 1). In many implementations, the problem was exacerbated by treating the sizes as signed numbers, which further lowered the limit to 2<sup>31</sup> − 1 bytes (2 GiB − 1). Files that were too large for 32-bit operating systems to handle came to be known as large files.
While the limit was quite acceptable at a time when hard disks were smaller, the general increase in storage capacity combined with increased server and desktop file usage, especially for database and multimedia files, led to intense pressure for OS vendors to overcome the limitation.
In 1996, multiple vendors responded by forming an industry initiative known as the Large File Summit to support large files on POSIX (at the time Windows NT already supported large files on NTFS), an obvious backronym of "LFS". The summit was tasked to define a standardized way to switch to 64-bit numbers to represent file sizes.