Jan 16, 2009

2B Free || ! 2B Free

Recently ext4 filesystem was marked as stable with release of Linux 2.6.28. Since I like bleeding edge from time to time and backup my files regularly anyway I decided to give it a spin. As far as performance is concerned, I have nothing to report yet, since I haven't been using it that long. But as usuall I found certain annoyance :-)

I was going through my filesystems and converting them one-by-one (after doing one more backup). When it came to /var I hit the wall though. df showed that there is free space (more than 400MB) but tar was telling me there is not enough space on the filesystem to create a directory (ENOSPC). So what was it? I was looking around and finally found the problem. Since the size of /var is only 1GB on my computer, mkfs.ext4 decided I will never use more than ~65000 inodes. Problem is that I have a lot of small files on the filesystem. Ebuilds, git and svn repositories and standard /var stuff. This together meant that I hit the 65000 mark quite easily whithout filling up the filesystem.

Solution to my problem was obvious from this point on. Recreate /var filesystem while manually overriding mkfs.ext4's choice for maximum inode count. Voila, ext4 seems working well from this point on.

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