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XFS, inodes, & imaxpct
Attempting to create a file on a large XFS filesystem - and it fails with an exception indicating insufficient space! There is available blocks - df says so. HUh? While, unlike traditional UNIX filesystems, XFS doesn't suffer from the boring old issue of "inode exhaustion" it does have inode limits - based on a percentage of the filesystem size.
linux-yu4c:~ # xfs_info /mnt
meta-data=/dev/sdb1 isize=256 agcount=4, agsize=15262188 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2
data = bsize=4096 blocks=61048752, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0
log =internal bsize=4096 blocks=29808, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=0
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0
The key is that "imaxpct" value. In this example inode's are limited to 25% of the filesystems capacity. That is a lot of inodes! But some tools and distributions may default that percentage to some much lower value - like 5% or 10% (for what reason I don't know). This value can be determined at filesystem creation time using the "-i maxpct=nn" option or adjusted later using the xfs_growfs command's "-m nn" command. So if you have an XFS filesystem with available capacity that is telling you it is full: check your "imaxpct" value, then grow the inode percentage limit.
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