1.) I recently filled my data partition full and got an error dialog, that there's no space left on the device (Resume, Retry, Skip, Abort, ... don't remember exactly) 2.) I used different terminal in order to move some of the big files (more than 40GB in total) from the affected partition to a different harddrive. But df was still showing 0 bytes available. 3.) Even of that I tried to resume the copying mentioned in point 1.) and it worked ... the copying was finished successfuly. What a magic! 4.) The situation changed after the reboot. I cannot copy new files to the affected partition anymore even if there must be at least 30GB of space left. This is what df returns: ------------------------- Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/md6 1209519868 1175334268 0 100% /mnt/data The difference between total and used blocks gives more than 32GB and I'm sure that yesterday this space was filled with data. I'm willing to do any non-destructive tests and collect any debug logs You need in order to find the root cause of this issue.
NOTE : Unfortunately I was performing the mentioned scenario on Mandriva Linux with the latest Mandriva desktop kernel [2.6.33-7mnb2] (and I know You don't like non-Vanilla kernels even if they almost don't differ from Vanilla), but I truly believe, that this problem comes from the mainline and therefore it's present in the mainline too. The issue persists even when I try Vanilla 2.6.37.2 ...
I just discovered, that I get "no space left" messages from user accounts only. The root account can fill the rest of the space without sign of problems ....
Sorry ... this seems to be a feature I didn't know about ... -> By default, 5% of the space on a filesystem is reserved for the root user. This is so that if the filesystem fills up, there's still a little space for root to come in and clean up the mess. You can change this percentage with the -m option of tune2fs; do not do this while the filesystem is mounted and read the manpage very carefully. This is a potentially dangerous operation.
That's right, you've run into the reserved-for-root space, which as you noted above, can be changed... So CLOSED/NOTABUG I think? -Eric
Yep .... I've already resolved/closed. But ... that points to the unintuitive df output, where the reserved part should be displayed. At the moment I don't know if that's easily possible, but I'll check that and create an enhancement ticket if so.