Re: [gentoo-user] how does Gentoo's mke2fs determine how many inodes to create?

[Robert Bridge <robert@robbieab.com>]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:45:58 +0200
Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday 11 July 2008, Miernik wrote:
> > I installed Gentoo using the handbook, and the root partition has
> > 4094951424 bytes (a 4 GB USB pendrive), and "mke2fs -j /dev/sda2" as
> > on
> > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=1&chap=
> >4#doc_chap4 created me a partition with only 249984 inodes. That was
> > REALLY SILLY of him, because:
> >
> > przehyba ~ # df -i /dev/sda2
> > Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
> > /dev/sda2             249984  249739     245  100% /
> > przehyba ~ #
> 
> Actually it's really silly of you to have done that for a gentoo root 
> partition. You have 16k per inode on average, much more than enough
> for normal purposes so it's a sane default for ext2/ext3.
> 
> I'll bet your problem is this:
> 
> alan@develop ~ $ find /var/portage/ | wc
>  143970  143970 7612245
> 
> That 65% of your inodes consumed right there in a required directory 
> structure. If so, easiest way out is to boot off a LiveCD, get access 
> to the pendrive and reduce it by about 350M or so. Create a new 
> filesystem in that space, mount it to $PORTDIR and move your portage 
> tree to it.
> 
> Someone else will need to confirm how big PORTDIR is on ext2/ext3, as 
> mine isn't. Also make sure distfiles is also a separate filesystem.

My experience when I was playing with Gentoo on a 2GB USB stick was
that fragmenting the device was a BAD idea, a much more efficient trick
is reducing the block size to 1k. This reduces the portage tree size
massively, and increases the number of inodes a lot, as inodes are
allocated proportional to the number of blocks.

YMMV,
Rob.
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