maximum swap partition size?

[James Ralston <qralston+ml redhat-taroon andrew cmu edu>]

All of the documentation I've found states that on i386, the maximum
swap partition size is 2GB.

As a test, on RHEL 3AS, I created an 8GB swap partition.  It would
appear that the kernel is using the entire 8GB space:

    $ cat /proc/swaps 
    Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
    /dev/sda5                       partition       8008328 0       -1

Has Red Hat applied patches to RHEL that permit swap partitions
greater than 2GB in size?  Or is /proc/swaps lying to me?

Does the stock 2.6 kernel permit swap partitions greater than 2GB on
i386?

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA