Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 37469
Upgrade fails: not enough inodes
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:49 EDT
Upgrading from RedHat 7.0, installation of new RPMs does not start at all and a dialog appears saying "not enough inodes on /, you need 1312 more inodes" (the actual number is around 1310 each time, but I'm not sure). My root partition is on /dev/hda9 and I include the relevant information from dumpe2fs: Inode count: 32128 Block count: 128488 Reserved block count: 6424 Free blocks: 77910 Free inodes: 14169 First block: 1 Block size: 1024 Fragment size: 1024 Blocks per group: 8192 Fragments per group: 8192 Inodes per group: 2008 Inode blocks per group: 251 I also include /etc/fstab: /dev/hda9 / ext2 defaults 1 1 /dev/hda2 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda12 /home ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0 /dev/hda13 /opt ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md2 /save ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md0 /tmp ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md1 /usr ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda14 /usr/local ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md3 /var ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md4 /var/spool/wwwoffle ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/md5 /var/spool/news ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 /dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0 Is anaconda really attempting to put 14000+ files in my root directory before removing what is already there ? This effectively prevents me from upgrading to 7.1 (ok, I might be able to upgrade through judicious use of RPM).
I believe the dev package is causing this problem. It has about 15000 files in it. To upgrade it we need to lay down the new files, and remove the old. I believe the rpm algorithm is seeing you have only 14000 free. If I read things correctly your / partition is only 64M in length. I think for future use you'll want this to be at least 128M. Might be a good time to reinstall. Otherwise you can go through /dev on your current system and remove enough entries to make room. There are lots of files in there you don't need. If you need help with this let me know. The best answer is to reinstall because unless you make '/' larger you'll hit this problem every release when upgrading.
The / partition should already be 128 MB; the blocks are 1k each (which I believe is the ext2 default) or at least so says "df". Hmmm ... I am thinking of setting up a root partition with more inodes and possibly smaller blocks (which might prove to be a good idea for multiple partition setups like mine in general, I might add).
Actually after some investigation the RPM maintainer discovered a bug in the accounting of inodes. Thanks for reporting this, it is not working correctly in our internal tree. If you continue to have problems let me know and we can try something else.