In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jean-Yves BARBIER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Sat, Oct 16, 1999 at 03:57:39PM -0600, Dwayne C . Litzenberger wrote: >> Okay, I'm back and running, and I figured out my problem. ext2 filesystems >> have reserved blocks, though I don't know what they're for. It seems only >> root can access them, although I haven't really checked this. tune2fs can >> lower the number of reserved blocks, but here's my question: >> Why, on a 6.4 GB hard drive, were there 300MB or reserved blocks? > >because mke2fs reserves an amount of 5% by default of the partition beeing >formatted for the superuser
Yes, but the actual _reason_ for that is that the block allocation algorithms of the ext2 filesystems need at least 5% of free space to work properly. Ever wondered why you do not need to defragment an ext2 filesystem? You can tune the free space and set it to 1% or so, but if you write to the partition a lot and it fills up, it will get a) very slow to write to and b) fragmented, so very slow to read from as well. For a filesystem with static content (like /usr) that you fill up only once and then just read from it doesn't matter as much. Mike. -- First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
