On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 6:57 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de> wrote: > > Hello list > > It came to my attention that during (after) an emerge run, df reports > considerably less space available on my / than before the emerge (everything > except /home sits on the root partition). I was wondering how this comes to > be, since I have /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs. > > I am in the middle of a KDE upgrade (4.8.0→4.8.1) right now and before I > started, I downloaded all distfiles and then looked at df /, it showed 1022 > blocks, hence about 1 GB of free disk space. I am at package 115 out of 174 > right now, and df shows a mere 389k blocks remaining. > > Also before I began the emerge run, I started 'ncdu -x /' which scans all dirs > on the / partition and then I can browse through my FS hieararchy, showing the > disk usage of every directory. Now I ran the same ncdu command again in > another screen, so I can compare it with the first one. > > The folders themselves have 0.1 to 0.2 GB difference between their old and new > state, and ncdu's bottom bar even shows the same values for both apparent and > real total disk usage (rounded to 0.1 GB). So what am I missing here? I > searched df's man page for something about apparent sizes/sparse files, but > then again, why would portage create such files in the first place? > > Do you have any thoughts that might help me understand what I'm seeing? > -- > Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' > I forbid any use of my email addresses with Facebook services. > > You will find everything in an online database. > Just not what you are looking for.
Unless you have it mounted on tmpfs for increased compilation speed as many others do, /var/tmp/portage can easily grow to several hundred megabytes as packages are compiled. Once the compilation finishes successfully, it will be cleaned up, so the contents are constantly changing during an emerge, and it may not be easy to track down after the fact.
