So I went to do a dnf system-upgrade from F35 to F36 on a test machine, as part of my usual testing. In the middle of the process, it appears that /var filled up and that left the system in an unfortunate state. Surprisingly (to me) it did boot with a random mix of F35 and F36 packages and even though it's a throwaway test box, I wanted to play around with fixing it a bit and trying to understand why it ran out of space instead of just reinstalling. Turns out that "dnf --releasever 36 --nogpgcheck remove --duplicates" was able to effectively everything in the system, and while running this /var filled up again. When that happened, dnf couldn't even be aborted; I had to kill -9. The culprit is the write-ahead log, /var/lib/rpm/rpmdb.sqlite-wal. I resized /var and reran, and by the end of the process had grown to over 9GB: -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 9124576392 May 13 13:11 rpmdb.sqlite-wal Of course it immediately went to 0 once the transaction completed, though rpmdb.sqlite went from: -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 281739264 May 11 14:24 rpmdb.sqlite to -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 730648576 May 13 13:15 rpmdb.sqlite which seems... odd for what's effectively just reinstalling the existing package set. Anyway, obviously the solution is to make sure that /var is "big enough" before you do a system upgrade. And we do have warnings about filesystems being too small, but nothing about needing an extra 10GB for this. Certainly my case might be somewhat pathological and it was good that in the end I was able to get the system back into a useful state without wiping it. But in the end I wonder: 1) Is it really expected that the wal file will grow to that size? 2) Is there anything to be done to reduce the size of the log? 3) Is there any better way to handle a lack of space in /var during an RPM transaction? 4) Can we estimate how large the file will grow, and refuse to start a system upgrade if there is not enough space? Certainly we already do this to some degree, but it seems that the estimate of the required space is a bit too small. - J< _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
