Root filesystem ran out of room in F11-on-XO1

[Mikus Grinbergs]

Disclaimer:  I am not asking for help;  I am sharing my experience.

Was running a large 'yum' update to an XO1 with os11 installed -- it
failed, because 'yum' ran out of room in the '/' filesystem.  I looked,
and it turned out that before this 'yum' run started, /dev/mtdblock0 had
been nearly 90% "used".  [For conveniences sake, because '/' is 1GB,
I'll say 10% of '/' is about 100MB (that disregards jffs2 "packing").]

For comparison, I have a not-used-for-testing XO1 with os10 installed --
its '/' filesystem shows "used" a bit over 50%.  The near 40% difference
in "how much was used" between the two systems comes out to over 400MB.
[ os11.zd did come with more facilities installed than did os10.zd ]

The amount of software I had added myself was approximately equal for
those os11 and os10 systems.  Let us assume that I had filled some 100MB
of the os11 system's space with "leftovers" from my testing.  That still
leaves the os11 system with 300MB plus of "occupancy" to be accounted
for.  My suspicion is that the major part of this difference in '/'
filesystem "used" is attributable to directory  /versions  in os11.


If my suspicion is correct, then the "ease of use" of olpc-update (which
depends upon /versions) needs to be balanced against the potential for
"shock" if the XO-1 user "runs out of room in the XO1" that much sooner.

mikus



p.s.
A partial printout from 'du' on the two systems:

>         Directory       os11        os10
> 
>         /bin            6475        6474
>         /etc           39513       39455
>         /lib           36428       28144
>         /tmp               0           0 
>         /var           35012       36009 
>         /boot           9319        9308
>         /home         122330       44500
>         /sbin          12722       12714
>         /security        140         140
>         /bootpart          0           0
>         /usr          964111      868882 
>         /versions     925311

I have no idea why /usr came out so big - I had told 'du' not to follow
symbolic links.  [Note that the numbers for /usr alone are in the
vicinity of the size of the whole /dev/mtdblock0 device -- does jffs2
"packing" account for this ?]

Also, /versions has lots of cross-links, which 'du' might have counted
as though they were separate files.