Re: [gentoo-user] [Gentoo install] Disk full at 35%?

[Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com>]

On 20 August 2011 18:52,  <covici@ccs.covici.com> wrote:
> Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It's been quite a few years but I decided to try another Gentoo
>> install (on a VirtualBox instance). I wanted to try out some new
>> things...
>>
>> I created a ton of partitions including /usr (I want to see if I can
>> get that to work), /portage, and /distfiles. The idea was to mount
>> /portage on top of /usr and /distfiles on top of /portage. This all
>> works fine.
>>
>> However, when I try to extract the Portage snapshot, I get "No space
>> left on device" a long way into the untar process. According to df
>> /portage (i.e. /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage) is only 35% full. In fact, not
>> a single partition or mount is even close to full (except for
>> /mnt/static, the DVD).
>>
>> If I untar directly to /usr (after unmounting /portage), everything
>> works fine. If I then try to copy or move to /portage, I get the "No
>> space left on device" again. And at the same place.
>>
>> Does anyone know what's going on here? I didn't realize I was doing
>> such strange things. At least not this early on. :-)
>
> See if  you are out of inodes. The only way to get the inodes that I am
> aware of is to  debugfs to the partition and do stat from within -- if
> there is a better way please let me know.  But why not use lvm?

Yes, df -i says /portage is out of inodes. I've never run into that
before. I reran mke2fs to increase the inode count and that fixed
things.

Would LVM somehow prevent these sort of things from happening? LVM
doesn't affect inode usage, does it? What exactly are the advantages
of LVM? Is it just that it's easier to resize LVM partitions after the
fact? (That would, of course, already be very useful.)