Re: [gentoo-user] Best file system for portage tree?

[José Romildo Malaquias]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 07:36:07PM +0100, YoYo Siska wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 03:35:05PM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> > On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:30:15 +0100, Alex Schuster wrote:
> >
> > > Any tips on this? Does it make sense to use a special file system just
> > > for the portage tree? What would be best? Would it help to re-create
> > > this file system from time to time in case it gets slower with every
> > > sync?
> >
> > I use an ext2 filesystem for portage, it's still the fastest out there.
> > Journals are unnecessary because its such a small filesystem, and if it
> > does get damaged I can just reformat and sync again.
>
> I use an ext2 partition in a 500MB file image on most of my computers.
> Its important to check the inode count on such small filesytem, as
> mke2fs' default inode ration for such size is 4096, which is too
> low for portage:
>
> dd bs=$((500*1024*1024)) count=1 if=/dev/zero of=/usr/img_portage
> mke2fs -f -b1024 -i2048 /usr/img_portage

The -f option from mke2fs is to specify a fragment size and expects an
argument. Do you -F (which forces mke2fs to create a filesystem, even if
the specified device is not a partittion on a block special device)?

> fstab:
> /usr/img_portage        /usr/portage/   ext2            loop,noatime            0 0
> (this is from desktop, on servers I usually only mount it manually when
> emerging)
>
> # df -h
> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/loop0      469M  306M  139M  69% /usr/portage
>
> # df -i
> Filesystem        Inodes   IUsed     IFree IUse% Mounted on
> /dev/loop0        256032  152044    103988   60% /usr/portage

Romildo