Nick Holland wrote: > wild guess: you have a "single partition" model, rather than the > suggested, so rather than the root file system being fairly quiet > during normal operation, you have a lot of overall filesystem > churn taking place. (I'm not a FS person...so I may be full of > ****).
Eh not quite... the particular VM whence this happened last used the installer-suggested slices, which may have worked against me: The OS disk was 16GB which resulted in a woefully undersized /usr, and 6.5 GB essentially wasted for unused /usr/src and /usr/obj. During my investigation I discovered - unbeknownst to me - that /usr was over full at 105%. Not sure how that happened, but this VM recently went through a successful upgrade to 7.7. I was able to discard the adjacent slice, reclaim the space and grow /usr, but for such a small disk a simpler partitioning scheme may have worked better. Interestingly, a partition being full did not email root, and I wonder if that is a worthwhile feature to add to security(8) as filling up the partition where /var/log resides could have security implications. > Also ... I'd be suspicious of your VM system being involved. You > didn't name it The particular host where I experienced this is running Hyper-V. However, there are many other VMs running various other OSes on that host and I can yank the (virtual) power cord to any of them and they will all recover gracefully. My suspicion is aimed at the small system disk, however.
