Re: HELP: Free space zero no matter what
In article <cistron.19991017013538.A314@evel.grave>,
Jean-Yves BARBIER <jybarbier@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>On Sat, Oct 16, 1999 at 03:57:39PM -0600, Dwayne C . Litzenberger wrote:
>> Okay, I'm back and running, and I figured out my problem. ext2 filesystems
>> have reserved blocks, though I don't know what they're for. It seems only
>> root can access them, although I haven't really checked this. tune2fs can
>> lower the number of reserved blocks, but here's my question:
>> Why, on a 6.4 GB hard drive, were there 300MB or reserved blocks?
>
>because mke2fs reserves an amount of 5% by default of the partition beeing
>formatted for the superuser
Yes, but the actual _reason_ for that is that the block allocation
algorithms of the ext2 filesystems need at least 5% of free space
to work properly. Ever wondered why you do not need to defragment an
ext2 filesystem?
You can tune the free space and set it to 1% or so, but if you write
to the partition a lot and it fills up, it will get a) very slow
to write to and b) fragmented, so very slow to read from as well.
For a filesystem with static content (like /usr) that you fill up
only once and then just read from it doesn't matter as much.
Mike.
--
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Reply to: