Re: EXT4 ENOSPC Bug

Theodore Tso
2009-02-16T15:20:33Z

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:37:19PM +0100, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> "Luckily", to prove that I am not completly mad I recently found this
> problem again. On a more recent kernel:
> 2.6.29-rc3-andres-00498-g68e80d5
> (upstream 2.6.29 + Theodore's ext4 debug patches)
>
> Again I got:
> open("/home/andres/tt", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK, 0666) = -1
> ENOSPC (No space left on device)

So /home/andres/tt does not exist, correct? Does this happen for any
attempt to create a new zero-length file using the "touch" command?
(Even in other directories) Can you append to a file using "cat
/etc/mailcap >> some_existing_file"?

If it is "yes" to the first two questions, and "no" the third, it
looks like this might be an inode allocation failure as opposed to a
block allocation failure.

Once this triggers, does it reliably continue to fail if you reboot?
Or does it go away when you reboot?

- Ted