On Feb 04, 2002 18:34 -0600, Skylar Thompson wrote: > > In the instant case, I am creating a filesystem for /home > > directories, thus, a 5% reservation for root is not needed here, so I > > shall take your advice and return it to the general free space pool. > > That's probably not a good idea. The space is used as a buffer against > filling filesystems completely, and also as a way to significantly reduce > fragmentation. I would leave it at 5% if I were you. Well, in general this buffer is to prevent _users_ from filling the filesystem, and when filesystems were smaller it wasn't such a huge waste of space. Yes, you are better off to not fill your filesystem, but if you have a laptop (which is not easily expanded with another disk) then you can reduce this margin. Either you need the space, and you don't care about the performance, or the space is unused and all is well. I still leave a few percent reserved on my root partition, so that tools like sendmail will refuse incoming email when the disk is nearly full, so that you will not have system problems if it fills completely. > > Why cannot ext2/ext3 allocate inode space on a dynamic basis? > > Not quite certain about that. If you want a good filesystem for handling > large files that also dynamically allocates inodes, I would try SGI XFS. > You can download the kernel patches from http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs. This has been discussed by the ext2 developers, and is not out of the realm of possibility. Unlike the reiserfs developers, who are willing to take larger risks in design and completely re-do their implementation, the ext2 developers want to make sure that they have considered any changes made from all angles before they "inflict" this upon the world. > > Also, I noticed that if I turn on ext3 journaling, I can no > > longer resize the partition with partition magic. So I am curious, how I > > can completely revert an ext3 partition back to ext2 (temporarily) so I > > can resize it, and then make it ext3 again. Is there a command line > > parameter for tune2fs which will reverse a "tune2fs -j"? > > All you have to do is delete the .journal file in the root of the > filesystem. Note the root of the filesystem, and not the root directory. This is actually a very bad idea. Use "tune2fs -O ^has_journal <dev>" to turn this off properly. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
