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.