Hey Tapani,
On 18 Jan 2020, at 10:30, Tapani Tarvainen ipfire@tapanitarvainen.fi wrote:
On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 10:57:08AM +0100, Jonatan Schlag (jonatan.schlag@ipfire.org) wrote:
Hi,
Daniel encountered the problem that his root partition was written full because of the qemu addon being too big (200 MB). See bug #12268 for details.
So he suggested moving the path /usr/share/qemu to /var. I do not really like this solution as there are standards how the filesystem hierarchy works under Linux.
Furthermore, as the systems become bigger (eg. moving python3 to the core) this problem will become more relevant to us. So I would like to start a discussion on how to solve this. Moving things to /var can only be a temporary solution. Should we force a reinstallation, which solves the root of the problem?
One obvious alternative would be using LVM. Combined with a suitable filesystem like ext4, it makes resizing filesystems pretty trivial. It does add a bit of overhead but not enough to matter here, IMHO.
Another would be using ZFS, which solves the problem a bit differently (and arguably better), but it's not included in mainline kernels due to licensing issues so it would add maintenance work.
FWIW, I like LVM and tend to use it in all systems where disk space and allocation is likely to change.
LVM is generally a good idea. However it is not implementable on systems that are already running out of space.
Back in the day it seemed to be a good idea to have different partitions for / and /var. New systems will now just have one partition for /. Simply put, you will have all the space your hardware allows you and if you are running out, you are running out.
ZFS is not available on Linux.
-Michael
-- Tapani Tarvainen