When will we have the large partition than just 2GB for the swap?

  When the each of the swap area partition or the swap file
can be taken large like the other partitions for filesystem or the 
normal files?

  I would like to know why even on the IA-64 system the single
swap area partition or the swap file is limited to 2GB in size.
I guess it is just left unchanged.

  I feel it is very inconvenient since I do want a large VM space
in my computation like 80GB or 160GB or 300GB using one to 
four HDD drives for that purpose. Since the current IA-64 Linuxen
(RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc) are all alike and I have to make
many partitions for swap areas or many files to enable the large 
space of VM gathered in total. For example, when I use 80GB for 
the VM, I have to create 40 of swap areas in disk partitions of 
size 2GB each. That is not tidy.

  In stead of having these too many meaning-less partitions,
I rather would like to assign one big partition or entire drive 
of size 80GB for that. Full four HD drives in case will do for 300GB.
 And I also believe it should be efficient to have the large
swap partitions to reduce the seeks than having many tiny pieces.
Especially correct in case using the RAID disk or LVM as the swap 
area, I guess.

  For the most system programming personel, if heared like above,
might say that it is not a good idea to use such a large VM space
than the actual memory size say 4GB, and might recommend me to use
the file I/O instead. However that is not what I would like to do.

  The 2GB of swap area size is very acceptable for the 32bit systems,
however since IA-64 is the 64bit addressing system, I think the
upper limit of each swap area size should be much larger, say, like 
1TB or more.

  Is it very difficult to change the kernel and some system library
and commands to accept the huge sized swap areas and swap files?

H.M.