Get over 2 GB limit creating PDFs with ImageMagick

Your limitation does not stem indeed from the filesystem; or from package versions I think.

Your 2GB limit is coming from you using a 32-bit version of your OS.

The option to increase the file would be installing a 64-bit version if the hardware supports it.

See Large file support

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 2³² − 1 bytes (4 GB − 1). In many implementations, the problem was exacerbated by treating the sizes as signed numbers, which further lowered the limit to 2³¹ − 1 bytes (2 GB − 1).

Try limiting the pixel cache used by convert to e.g. 1 GiB:

convert 0001.miff ... 2000.miff -limit memory 1GiB -limit map 1GiB -compress jpeg -quality 80 out.pdf

Hopefully this will force ImageMagic to regularly dump already processed data on the disk instead of trying to fit more than 2 GiB in RAM buffers.

BTW, the amount of virtual memory available to a single process on 32-bit Linux is defined by the VMSPLIT kernel config setting. This can be either 2G/2G (2GB for kernel + 2GB for userland) or 1G/3G (1 GB for kernel + 3 GB for userland). On a running system, the setting can be found via

zcat /proc/config.gz | grep VMSPLIT

On some systems the kernel config is stored in /boot/config-$(uname -r) instead.