[gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes

[gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes

[Maxim Wexler]

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

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

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 28 May 2009 09:46:03 -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote:

> 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.

It can if you have $DISTDIR and $PORTAGE_TMPDIR in there. I have
$PORTAGE_TMPDIR on an SD card and $DISTDIR is a network mount, so several
computers can use the same source files.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

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

[Florian Philipp]

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.

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

[Maxim Wexler]

> My advice: Save everything to another disk and then reformat the
> partition with a higher amount of inodes.

Everything? Won't that copy over the extraneous inodes?

>
> This will create a file system with three times as many indoes as you
> had before.

Is 3x enough? I haven't even gotten off the ground yet, 28 lines in
/var/db/pkg/world and my alotted inodes have been already used up? No
gnome, kde, gimp, office etc etc.

FWIW, I thought I'd chroot in and do an emerge -C mozilla-firefox but
it hadn't even been installed yet! It choked on dev-java/jdk. So, did
emerge mozilla-firefox. Same thing:

IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device:
'/var/db/pkg/dev-java/-MERGING-sun-jdk-1.6.0.13/CFLAGS'

mw

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

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 28 May 2009 23:43:19 Maxim Wexler wrote:
> > My advice: Save everything to another disk and then reformat the
> > partition with a higher amount of inodes.
>
> Everything? Won't that copy over the extraneous inodes?

You appear to not understand what an inode is.

The inode IS THE FILE. It's a specially formatted block on disk, the 
filesystem knows how to interpret it, and it contains all known information 
(except one piece) about the file - as in, everything that ls can display.

The missing bit of information is the name you call it by, that is stored in 
the directory (which is really just a special file and contains file names and 
their corresponding inode numbers - this is how the fs driver finds files).

When you copy a file, the inode is read and a new one initialized in the new 
location. Then the disk blocks are read from the original and copied to the 
destination. As the destination does this, the fs driver knows how to keep 
it's inode accounting intact.

So, there is no such thing as an extraneous inode. It's either being used (and 
thus gets copied) or it is not used (and does not get copied). You cannot copy 
a file without copying it's inode, and you cannot copy an inode without 
copying the file (special exception - files of zero length).

> > This will create a file system with three times as many indoes as you
> > had before.
>
> Is 3x enough? I haven't even gotten off the ground yet, 28 lines in
> /var/db/pkg/world and my alotted inodes have been already used up? No
> gnome, kde, gimp, office etc etc.

You will need approx 500,000 inodes on an average machine total, split that up 
amongst your mounted volumes as appropriate. Use "find -x | wc" on an existing 
machine per mount point to get a rough idea of the scale.

> FWIW, I thought I'd chroot in and do an emerge -C mozilla-firefox but
> it hadn't even been installed yet! It choked on dev-java/jdk. So, did
> emerge mozilla-firefox. Same thing:
>
> IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device:
> '/var/db/pkg/dev-java/-MERGING-sun-jdk-1.6.0.13/CFLAGS'

Well, what did you expect? You have used up all the "index entries" for files, 
and you are trying to create more files. What else could it do apart from 
fail?

Log onto the machine and delete some stuff. Then try unmerge to free up more 
space. Then backup, reformat, restore.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

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.

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

[Maxim Wexler]

Ok, thanks everybody, getting ready to dive in and fix this thing. Two
more questions please:

I modified the bottom of /etc/fstab to look like this according to a
post in the eee forum:
...
#shm    /dev/shm    tmpfs    nodev,sosuid,noexec                 0 0
tmpfs    /tmp            tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777     0 0

Does this have anything to do with the inode issue?

What's the best fs for a 4G SSD? I picked ext3 because of another eee
forum post.

Maxim

On 5/28/09, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>

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

[Dale]

Maxim Wexler wrote:
> Ok, thanks everybody, getting ready to dive in and fix this thing. Two
> more questions please:
>
> I modified the bottom of /etc/fstab to look like this according to a
> post in the eee forum:
> ...
> #shm    /dev/shm    tmpfs    nodev,sosuid,noexec                 0 0
> tmpfs    /tmp            tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777     0 0
>
> Does this have anything to do with the inode issue?
>
> What's the best fs for a 4G SSD? I picked ext3 because of another eee
> forum post.
>
> Maxim
>
>   

Since I have a old install, maybe the new fstabs don't have this info. 
This is what is in mine:


# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none            /proc        proc        defaults        0 0
# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
none            /dev/shm        tmpfs        defaults        0 0


From that I gather that the system won't boot without /proc and that
glibc requires /dev/shm for some reason or other.  I'm not sure why you
want to remove something that appears to be required.  Maybe you have
something different that doesn't need this?

Hope that helps.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Fri, 29 May 2009 11:32:58 -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote:

> tmpfs    /tmp            tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777     0 0
> 
> Does this have anything to do with the inode issue?

Only that it reduces the number of inodes needed by mounting/tmp on a
ramfs.
 
> What's the best fs for a 4G SSD? I picked ext3 because of another eee
> forum post.

I found the best way to deal with the Eee 900's two drives was to create
a small root partition (I used 200M) and swap on sda. Then make the rest
of sda and all of sdb into an LVM volume group. I still use ext3 for /,
but it contains so little that inodes are not an issue. You definitely
want to get /usr/portage, $PORTAGE_TMPDIR and $DISTDIR off the root
partition.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Life is just one BIG beta test cycle


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

[Maxim Wexler]

> I found the best way to deal with the Eee 900's two drives was to create
> a small root partition (I used 200M) and swap on sda. Then make the rest
> of sda and all of sdb into an LVM volume group. I still use ext3 for /,
> but it contains so little that inodes are not an issue. You definitely
> want to get /usr/portage, $PORTAGE_TMPDIR and $DISTDIR off the root
> partition.

Just got back from Circuit City or whatever it's called with a 16G SD
card and I'm steeling myself for the big task ahead. Just what do you
have under root? How did you format the rest?

Maxim

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

[Mike Kazantsev]

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On Fri, 29 May 2009 19:39:09 -0600
Maxim Wexler <maxim.wexler@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just got back from Circuit City or whatever it's called with a 16G SD
> card and I'm steeling myself for the big task ahead. Just what do you
> have under root? How did you format the rest?

ext4 or reiserfs for root.

reiserfs for portage and tmp (usually used by ccache).
I choose reiser here because it has the best small-file performance,
can use tail packing to save space on working with small files and you
never ever have to worry about inode shortage.
ccache, portage and tmp/portage are thousands of small files.

On this laptop:

/dev/mapper/aux-root on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime,acl) [ 5.2G / 10G ]
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw,noatime) [ 114M / 183M ]
/dev/mapper/prime-varz on /var type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime) [ 519M / 2G ]
/dev/mapper/prime-core on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime) [ 4.8G / 10G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-extent on /mnt/extent type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime) [ 6.6G / 10G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-stash on /mnt/stash type reiserfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,nodiratime) [ 8G / 30G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-tmp on /var/tmp type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime) [ 3G / 10G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-portage on /usr/portage type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime) [ 800M / 3G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-iwd on /mnt/stash/wine/iwd type xfs (rw,noatime) [ 2.2G / 5G ]
/dev/mapper/aux-fallout on /mnt/stash/wine/fallout type xfs (rw,noatime) [ 600M / 5G ]

"prime" is an LVM group on encrypted (dmcrypt) partition (/root and /etc
repository are symlinked to /home).
/opt and /usr/games are symlinked to /mnt/extent/, since they are quite
heavy.
xfs lvs are case-insensitive, so it allows to use any native linux
tools (like WeiDU) on wine-accessed files, without having to convert
their case.

LVM is a sorta godsend for me here ;)

-- 
Mike Kazantsev // fraggod.net

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

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Fri, 29 May 2009 19:39:09 -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote:

> > I found the best way to deal with the Eee 900's two drives was to
> > create a small root partition (I used 200M) and swap on sda. Then
> > make the rest of sda and all of sdb into an LVM volume group. I still
> > use ext3 for /, but it contains so little that inodes are not an
> > issue. You definitely want to get /usr/portage, $PORTAGE_TMPDIR and
> > $DISTDIR off the root partition.  
> 
> Just got back from Circuit City or whatever it's called with a 16G SD
> card and I'm steeling myself for the big task ahead. Just what do you
> have under root? How did you format the rest?

My SD card is not part of the volume group. The Eee PC 900 has two SSDs
internally, one at 4GB and one at 16GB (for the Linux version). The root
partiton only contains what needs to be there: /boot, /etc, /bin, /lib
and /sbin. Everything else (/usr, /var, /home, /opt) is on the VG.
$PORTAGE_TMPDIR and $DISTDIR and on a network mount.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Sir! Romulan warbird decloaki»®õ÷üÁ NO CARRIER

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Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Florian Philipp]

Maxim Wexler schrieb:
> On 5/28/09, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 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'.
>>>>
[...]
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>
>>
> Ok, thanks everybody, getting ready to dive in and fix this thing. Two
> more questions please:
>
[...]
>
> What's the best fs for a 4G SSD? I picked ext3 because of another eee
> forum post.
>
> Maxim
> 

I just want to point to three blog posts from Theodore Ts'o:

Partioning scheme and formatting tricks for optimal performance:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

Talk about some general issues (ATA TRIM, mostly):
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/22/should-filesystems-be-optimized-for-ssds/

Making an argument for using journalling filesystems:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/

Of course, T'so talks about an Intel X25-M which is a completely
different beast from those cheap SSDs you find in netbooks.

Delaying commits with ext4 and/or laptop-mode will reduce the wear-down
of your SSD but it might as well freeze your system when the actual
commit takes place because these things tend to have a terribly low
write performance.

In the end it will be a matter of playing with parameters.

Re: Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sat, 30 May 2009 12:06:04 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote:

> Delaying commits with ext4 and/or laptop-mode will reduce the wear-down
> of your SSD but it might as well freeze your system when the actual
> commit takes place because these things tend to have a terribly low
> write performance.

That may explain the pauses I get from time to time. Maybe shortening the
commit period will help.

Or I could try btrfs, which has an ssd mount option.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Electricians DO IT until it Hz...

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Re: Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Eray Aslan]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 02:40:34PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 30 May 2009 12:06:04 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote:
> 
> > Delaying commits with ext4 and/or laptop-mode will reduce the wear-down
> > of your SSD but it might as well freeze your system when the actual
> > commit takes place because these things tend to have a terribly low
> > write performance.
> 
> That may explain the pauses I get from time to time. Maybe shortening the
> commit period will help.

Couple of points regarding the pauses, SSDs, schedulers and ext3/ext4:

* try ext4 with its delayed allocation. It should help with pauses
* ext3 with data=writeback should help.  Some security implications with
data=writeback tho.  So be careful if it is not a single user machine.
* Deadline scheduler has more throughput than CFQ or anticipatory but it
is totally unusable under load
* A lot of patches to ext3 and ext4 for a/m pauses and SSDs.  Some made
it to kernel 2.6.30 I believe.
* Try CFQ and NOOP as schedulers for SSDs for now.  After the above
patches, CFQ should be the better choice.

Basically, a lot of changes to ext3/ext4 and schedulers at the moment.
I would wait for at least kernel 2.6.31 before trying alternatives and
making decisions.
 
> Or I could try btrfs, which has an ssd mount option.

Ugh.  Even on-disk format is not finalized yet.

-- 
Eray

Re: Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sat, 30 May 2009 22:25:29 +0300, Eray Aslan wrote:

> > Or I could try btrfs, which has an ssd mount option.  
> 
> Ugh.  Even on-disk format is not finalized yet.

That's OK, I'm not using it on my backup server :)


-- 
Neil Bothwick

CAUTION: Do not install prior to installation.

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Re: Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Wyatt Epp]

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On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, 30 May 2009 22:25:29 +0300, Eray Aslan wrote:
>
> > > Or I could try btrfs, which has an ssd mount option.
> >
> > Ugh.  Even on-disk format is not finalized yet.
>
> That's OK, I'm not using it on my backup server :


Sorry to send this back up, but are you going to try this?

In light of Michael's test results at
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=btrfs_ssd_mode&num=1, I
should be rather interested to hear how that goes for a *real* use scenario.

Cheers,
Wyatt

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Re: Tweaks for SSDs [Was: [gentoo-user] [ot] no more inodes]

[Maxim Wexler]

> Partioning scheme and formatting tricks for optimal performance:
> http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

Great resource. I wonder if any members found objections posted by
'starfry' at the bottom of the article worthy of consideration. Or did
they find the author's recommendations spot on? wrt partitioning with
lvm particularly.

Maxim

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

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 28 May 2009 17:46:03 Maxim Wexler wrote:
> 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.

Your problem isn't that you have no more space.

Your problem is that you cannot create any more files.

Inodes - google it.


>
> Maxim

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com