Thanks for the corrections.
Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
On Thu 10 May 2007 15:34:15 NZST +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
ext3 reserves a percentage of the disk for the root user. This should stop
the disk becoming over full, and a llow some overhead for root to do
things in an emergency.
Yes. Normal users get a disk full error, but for the system (and root)
there is a little bit of space left so that the data that is still
sitting in RAM waiting to be written to disk can actually be written
instead of being lost. This originates from a very early unix concept of
telling applications that the data was writtento disk when in fact it is
still floating around in various RAM buffers, for performance reasons.
The default is 10% which on a 100G drive is a big chunk that is
effectively "lost" to the real users.
The default for ext2 and ext3 has always been 5%. Too big these
days, but it also depends on the number of partitions. Perhaps RAM
size isn't bad as orientation for the reserved amount. I'd use quotas
myself and a reserved amount of not more than a few hundred MB.
man tune2fs
No it doesn't say what the default is, but man mkfs.ext3 and man
mkfs.ext2 do.
Volker
