Question about mkfs.ext3

[Nifty Fedora Mitch]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 07:11:59PM -0700, john wendel wrote:
> Subject: Question about mkfs.ext3
> From: john wendel <jwendel10 at comcast.net>
> To: For users of Fedora <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:11:59 -0700
> Reply-To: "Community assistance, encouragement,
> 	and advice for using Fedora." <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Delivered-To: niftyfedora at niftyegg.com
> Return-Path: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> Message-ID: <49EA886F.1050802 at comcast.net>
> Sender: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> 
> I'm formatting a new disk and running mkfs.ext3. I asked for 25000  
> inodes with "-N 25000", but it gave me 118,272 inodes.
>
> What did I do wrong?

How big is the device?
What other info is generated -- block size, journal size, ...?
Perhaps try a dry run with -n -v

25000 is a small number for the total number of files and dirs.
The number of inodes must permit accessing the full disk at some point.
I know that XFS will add inodes if it needs them but I do not know
about ext3.

Still it could be possible on a small enough device.

I see on this box:
$ df -i | egrep File\|boot
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              50200      41   50159    1% /boot

$ df -h  | egrep File\|boot
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             190M   22M  159M  12% /boot

Since I have  discarded USB keys bigger than this I wonder if 25000 is
sane and you are hitting some internal sanity check.   It also seems that
there are more defaults and knobs than I knew...  see /etc/mke2fs.conf
Read about and try the "-T" flags...


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?