Re: ext3 behaviour when no space on disk

[Duncan Sands <duncan sands wanadoo fr>]

On Tuesday 04 June 2002 7:09 pm, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> 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.

Hi Andreas, I performed the above test (untarring kernels while compiling)
after having applied Andrew's patch.  It behaved perfectly: I ran out of space
(i.e. no more inodes), but there were no problems with the journal, in fact no
problems at all.

This looks like a good patch to submit.

Thanks to you both for sorting this out.

Ciao,

Duncan.