Re: Allocating inodes from a single block

[Michael Nishimoto <miken@agami.com>]

Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 11:11:50AM -0700, Michael Nishimoto wrote:
> 
>  > Filesystem free space becomes fragmented over time.  It's possible
>  > for total free space to be a decent size and still not have a chunk
>  > large enough to allocate new inodes.
> 
> by default there is a restriction that indoes shouldn't consume more
> that 25% of the total space
> 
> see the mkfs.xfs man-page for details, search for 'maxpct'
> 
> for existing filesystems you can use xfs_db to rewrite this value

I do know about the 25% restriction, but that isn't what I'm talking
about.  I'm not suggesting to fillup a filesystem 100% with
inodes.

Imagine a case where only 2-3% of the space is inodes but that 94%
of the total space was filled.  If the remaining 6% of space is
highly fragmented, then no new inodes can be allocated.  The dialloc
code couldn't find 8 contiguous blocks.

    Mike