no inodes free

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Mon Dec 18 11:32:34 PST 2006


    Basically the issue is that UFS has a limited number of inodes,
    settable when the filesystem is formatted, and it is fairly easy to
    run out of available inodes on 'small' filesystems which have lots of
    tiny files in them.

    This isn't usually a problem on typical small filesystems like '/'
    which have a fairly predictable (and small) number of files.  It is
    more a problem with filesystems like /usr and /home which are expected
    to be larger.

    It is possible to increase the number of inodes when formatting the
    filesystem with newfs (which of course destroys anything you had on
    there before :-)).  The -i options to newfs can be used to do this.
    e.g. '-i 16384'.  Back up your filesystem, do 'df -i', and record
    the number of inodes, then unmount and try newfs'ing with various -i
    values.  To check the number of inodes actually created mount and
    df -i the filesystem.  It takes a bit of fooling around to understand
    the dynamic.

    Generally though you want to avoid having to specify special options
    to newfs.  In this case, a larger partition is probably the better
    solution.

						-Matt





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