Bugzilla Bug 193586

I have a GameCube that I run Gentoo Linux on.

Since quite a while I have been patching /lib/rcscripts/addons/udev-start.sh to
use my specified mount option for number of inodes. Without it, I get "no space
left on device" errors on boot-up when udev tries to create nodes on /dev. I
dont know what the default nr_inodes is, or how it is calculated.

My patch is in the URL.
In /etc/udev/udev.conf I set tmpfs_size="256k" and tmpfs_inodes="3k"


Reproducible: Always

Don't refer to external links for patches, please. We have attachments feature
for this.

From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt:
nr_inodes: The maximum number of inodes for this instance. The default
           is half of the number of your physical RAM pages, or (on a
           machine with highmem) the number of lowmem RAM pages,
           whichever is the lower.

On my system the tmpfs has 128738 inodes.
# df -i /dev/
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
udev                  128738    3394  125344    3% /dev

So for systems with low number of physical RAM pages this could be too low.
Can please give info about how low this is for you.

This is now implemented in udev-115-r6

Created an attachment (id=131799) [details]
The file from the URL

Here's the patch, as an attachment.

(In reply to comment #2)
> From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt:
> nr_inodes: The maximum number of inodes for this instance. The default
>            is half of the number of your physical RAM pages, or (on a
>            machine with highmem) the number of lowmem RAM pages,
>            whichever is the lower.
> 
> On my system the tmpfs has 128738 inodes.
> # df -i /dev/
> Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
> udev                  128738    3394  125344    3% /dev
> 
> So for systems with low number of physical RAM pages this could be too low.
> Can please give info about how low this is for you.

Istead of messing up my /dev, I made a new filesystem for the test using the
default values.

cubesmurf ~ # free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         20036      18576       1460          0          4      10676
-/+ buffers/cache:       7896      12140
Swap:        16376          0      16376
cubesmurf ~ # mkdir /bla
cubesmurf ~ # mount -t tmpfs none /bla -o exec,nosuid,mode=0755,size=10M
cubesmurf ~ # df -i /bla
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
none                    2504       1    2503    1% /bla


The problem is ofcourse:

cubesmurf ~ # find /dev/ | wc -l
2753

so my /dev is now mounted with size=256k,nr_inodes=3k and hence looks like:

cubesmurf ~ # df -i /dev
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
udev                    3072    2752     320   90% /dev

Thanks for fixing this, I wa hoping that I can avoid the patch in the future,
it's so annoying when I forgot about it :)

(In reply to comment #3)
> This is now implemented in udev-115-r6

Great, works fine! Thanks, excellent support :)