Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

[Mick]

On Monday 25 Jul 2011 11:24:33 YoYo Siska wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:02:34AM +0100, Mick wrote:
> > After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the
> > usual office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough
> > space in /var (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).
> >
> > Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is
> > going down fast!  O_O
> >
> > OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size
> > without a problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space,
> > but I'm thinking of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on
> > this machine so that's not a solution for this circumstance.
> >
> > Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the
> > middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it,
> > but it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).
>
> You can mount --bind  a dir from a large partition to /var/tmp/portage
> before an emerge, but you can't do that during a running emerge. However
> with a reasonable buildsystem, you could in theory stop the emerge, copy
> over the files in /var/tmp/portage to new location (preserving
> timestamps) and then try resuming the emerge with FEATURES="keepwork
> noclean", though i don't know if that works well with openoffice...
>
> Also you don't have to mount anything to /var/tmp/portage, you can just
> change the dir by setting PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a directory on a partition
> with enough space (I normally have my DISTDIR, PKGDIR and PORTAGE_TMP set
> on a different partition...)

Oh yes!  Of course, PORTAGE_TMPDIR .... what was I thinking?!!

Thank you.

I never understood properly how the mount --bind/rbind works.  I understand 
that the original partition content becomes visible on a second partition, but 
I'm not at all sure what happens when the space on the first partition runs 
out?
-- 
Regards,
Mick