Re: ext3 behaviour when no space on disk

[Andreas Dilger <adilger clusterfs com>]

On Jun 04, 2002  16:19 +0200, Duncan Sands wrote:
> Summary: not a problem with the disk being full.  This is bad.
> 
> Ok, I did some more tests.  Results are for 2.4.19-pre10.  I applied
> Andrew's patch and filled up my disk 100% by copying a huge file
> to the partition.  No journal abort occurred.  I then did the same thing
> without Andrew's patch.  No journal abort occurred either!  (I observed
> no other problems either).  Now, the abort I reported occurred when I
> was simultaneously compiling two kernels while untarring two others.
> So I became suspicious that maybe the problem came from heavy
> system load rather than the disk being full.  I performed the following test:
> 
> (1) booted 2.4.19-pre10 with mem=50M (because I have a bad bit
> around 105M).
> 
> (2) while printing disk output (df) every 5 seconds simultaneously did:
>   (a) untarred three kernels (tar xj)
>   (b) compiled two kernels
> 
> After about 5-10 minutes of this I got a journal abort while the filesystem
> was only 70% full (same message as in my original email: error 28 in
> ext3_new_inode).

You are running out of available inodes.  The call to ext3_new_inode()
is trying to allocate a new inode (not surprisingly), and this is what
Andrew's patch is fixing.  It generates the same error code as when
you run out of blocks, which is -ENOSPC = -28.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/