Re: How much free space in /var is required for upgrades?

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On 5/16/22 13:39, Panu Matilainen wrote:
On 5/13/22 21:54, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
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?

No.

2) Is there anything to be done to reduce the size of the log?

Yeah, such as reporting incidents like this.

FWIW, this should be fixed in upstream now and rawhide as of rpm-4.18.0-0.alpha2.1 build.

For the future: If you suspect a bug in rpm, just file one. Preferably upstream. Messages to fedora-devel are easily lost in the noise and may not be seen at all by us rpm maintainers.

	- Panu -
_______________________________________________
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




[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora Users]     [Fedora Kernel]     [Fedora Testing]     [Fedora Formulas]     [Fedora PHP Devel]     [Kernel Development]     [Fedora Legacy]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Desktop]     [PAM]     [Red Hat Development]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]

  Powered by Linux