Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 141464
no clear explanation of alleged "additional disk space" required
Last modified: 2014-08-04 18:15:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: Under the section "Hard Disk Space Requirements", there is the passage: ----- "The disk space requirements listed below represent the disk space taken up by Fedora Core 3 after the installation is complete. However, additional disk space is required during the installation to support the installation environment. This additional disk space corresponds to the size of /Fedora/base/stage2.img (on CD-ROM 1) plus the size of the files in /var/lib/rpm on the installed system. In practical terms, this means that as little as an additional 90MB can be required for a minimal installation, while as much as an additional 175MB can be required for an "everything" installation." ----- But there is no explanation as to *what* this additional disk space is going to be used for, or even what part of the disk will be used for it. For example, it says that part of that space will be necessary for the stage2.img image. But I recall (from somewhere) that this image is copied into, and mounted from, RAM. So what does that have to do with needing additional *disk* space? And if it *does* require additional disk space, where does it get it from? The root filesystem? Some other filesystem? That's pretty important information to know in deciding how to allocate filesystem space. This is not just an academic question. During my first FC3 install, I allocated 256M for the root filesystem, which has historically been plenty (I put pretty much everything else into logical volumes). Yet anaconda choked, complaining that it ran out of space with no further explanation. On a hunch, I bumped up the root filesystem to 512M and everything worked. Why was that? I've asked this question on the anaconda list and still haven't gotten a clear answer. I'd really like to see some detail on this alleged "necessary" additional disk space. A footnote if necessary, but still, it should be there. And an explanation of what *temporary* additional space is being used under /var/lib/rpm as well, and for what. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. read doc 2. 3. Additional info:
John, if you change the source in CVS, let me know and I'll regenerate for the website.
I am not the maintainer/writer of the FC3 release notes, but I'll try to expound on this as best I can. I've brought this question to our developers who explained to me that "additional" disk space is used primarily for the following: 1) the copying of the stage2.img image during a disc installation. 2) the RPM transaction 3) the copying and installation of packages As these are ephemeral processes, they need additional disk space above and beyond the required space needed for the various install classes.
Closing, this is addressed at least as of FC5t1.