Re: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes

[Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com>]

On Donnerstag 28 Mai 2009, Florian Philipp wrote:
> Maxim Wexler schrieb:
> > Hi group,
> >
> > For a netbook 4G SSD. Attempting to install mozilla-firefox. jdk
> > fails: No space left on device.
> >
> > df -i reveals no more inodes. I reboot thinking this will help. Wrong.
> > Lots of 'No space left on device messages'  with reference to
> > /var/lib/iinit.d/* in the boot console. And this gem: '*ERROR: local
> > is already starting'. And: '*ERROR: netmount is already starting'.
> >
> > df -i
> >
> > Filesytem    Inodes       Iused         IFree      IUse%      Mounted on
> > /dev/sda2   244320      244301          19       100%       /
> > udev           128448           612   127836            1%       /dev
> > /dev/sda1       8032             39       7993            1%       /boot
> > tmpfs           128448              3  1 28445            1%       /tmp
> >
> > FYI sda2 is formatted ext3.
> >
> > I know 4G is pretty small by today's standards but apart from xorg and
> > firefox everything else on this unit is command-line type utilities
> > and such. That can't account for 4G already.
> >
> > Maxim
>
> That you run out of inodes doesn't mean that you run out of physical (or
> logical) space on your disk. It just means that you run out of what you
> could call file descriptors.
>
> There is exactly one inode per file which stores meta information about
> this file. Ext2-4 have a fixed amount of inodes set when you format the
> partition. Reiserfs and JFS create them on the fly and therefore don't
> have problems with running out of inodes or wasting space on unused ones.
>
> Most likely you have a bunch of very small files on our disk, for
> example the portage tree. These don't consume much space but a lot of
> inodes.
>
> My advice: Save everything to another disk and then reformat the
> partition with a higher amount of inodes. If you use ext2, format it with
>
> mke2fs -N 732960 /dev/sda2
>
> This will create a file system with three times as many indoes as you
> had before.
>
> Hope this helps.

or don't use extX.