On 9/19/22 3:53 PM, Barry wrote:
On 19 Sep 2022, at 06:30, Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Sun, 2022-09-18 at 21:44 -0500, Robert Nichols wrote:
With a symlink, that "data" is the string that shows as the symlink target. The advantage over a tiny file is that if the string is short enough to fit within the inode structure, no data block on the disk needs to be allocated. That's faster and more efficient than creating a file since the inode needs to be set up and written in any case. systemd is far from the first program to take advantage of this.
Interesting. What about the old running out of inodes on a disc problem? How did they handle that?
I would assume that the file system is created with lots of inodes so it is never a problem in practice.
It's a problem that crops up occasionally, and makes people wonder why they get a "No space on filesystem" error when the df command shows that plenty of space is available. That's why the df command has a "-i" option to report inode usage. A filesystem that's being used for things like a news spool, which holds lots of small files, needs to be created with more than the default allocation of inodes.