Re: ext4 no space left

From: Victor Pelt
Date: Wed Jan 21 2009 - 13:15:46 EST


upgrading to 2.6.29-rc2-git1 did allow me to use most of the space but
i still can't quite use all of it. maybe this is to be expected.
(note: i'm just trying testing now, everything i used to have on my
old partition fits. i'm just trying to understand what exactly is
'full'. it seems the file system is 'holding something back'

i included a dumo of df, df -i and tune2fs -l /dev/hda2
(and partition that has ext4 is the / partition or /dev/hda2)

victor


On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 04:18:35PM +0100, Victor Pelt wrote:
>> i set the number mounted counter to 31, which forced fsck to run on
>> the next reboot. I rebooted, fsck didn't show any erros, but i still
>> got the no space left error when i tried to copy files to the
>> partition.
>
> OK, if a reboot didn't help, I'll bet I know what happened. E2fsprogs
> changed the default default inode ratio, which means that number of
> inodes being created is half what it was previously. If you do a "df
> -i", you'll probably see that you have exhausted the number of inodes
> in the filesystem.
>
> The default inode ratio controlled by /etc/mke2fs.conf, and is
> currently 16k. That is, it assumes the average size of files on the
> filesystem is at least 16k. (It previously was 8k.) For large
> filesystems, this is not a problem; I'm guessing that you have a small
> root filesystem, and probably are using a hard-coded /dev partition,
> so the large number of (zero-length) device files is throwing off the
> average. If you recreate the filesystem with mke2fs -I 8192, it
> should allow you to copy over all of your files in the root
> filesystem.
>
> Finally, note that we made this change for all ext2/3/4 filesystems,
> so this is not unique to ext4; it's just that you reformatted your
> root filesystem for the first time since upgrading to a newer
> e2fsprogs with the changed default, and you ran into this problem. If
> there are enough people who are using small root filesystems, maybe
> we'll need to have some adjusted hueristics. Right now we have
> "floppy" for filesystems less than 3 megs, "small" for filesystems
> less than 512 megs, and every thing else is default. Maybe we need to
> have a "medium" for filesystems smaller than 10 gigs, perhaps, and use
> a default inode ratio of 8192 for medium-sized filesystems....
>
> - Ted
>

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