I recently noticed that the defaults for mkfs.ext2 have changed somewhat recently (or maybe not somewhere after 2.2 kernel was finalized)... the main changes I am interested in are the default block size which was 1024 and is now 4096 and the number of inodes created which was 1 for every 4096 bytes, the new defaults appear to be 4096 block size and 1 inode per 8192 bytes, same ratio but you still end up with half as many inodes... having just run out of inodes on my 200MB root filesystem (only /home and /usr are farmed out on this system) and having had created that filesystem with the older ext2fs utils it has 1 inode per 4096 bytes ... (the filesystem has about 77000 inodes which figures about right, I don't see anything unusual I am not sure how i managed to run out of inodes...) what is the general opinion on the number of inodes that should be made on a filesystem? is there any disadvantage to creating much more inodes then default? (i would guess longer fsck times but that is less annoying then running out of inodes...) also what about the larger block size, I imagine this is faster but how much space is really wasted on average by the larger block size? fortunately I am in the process of replacing this box and the lack of inodes is not a huge problem at the moment (i found some files to delete so the system can function properly at least), but I want to avoid this in the future... does anyone know what the rationals were for changing these defaults? thanks Best Regards, Ethan Benson To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
