Andreas
The bug-fileutils mailing list is to report bugs in the GNU fileutils
package. You not seem to have reported a bug but have asked for
system help instead. However it is hard not to try to help.
> Running df -h produces:
>
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda1 7.6G 7.5G 0 100% /
> /dev/hdb1 6.0G 3.6G 2.0G 64% /home
>
> As you can see, not all of the drive is used. In fact, I've tried freeing
> up some space on the drive but it still reports that the drive is full. Why
> is this?
UNIX file systems reserve a 'minfree' amount of disk space that is
available only to root processes. The idea is that a user cannot fill
up the disk and run the operating system completely out of space.
Also, a significant amount of free space is needed to allow the
filesystem to automatically defragment itself. Performance can drop
to as much as a third of normal performance with heavy fragmentation.
Preserving a minfree value allows the filesystem to prevent
fragmentation. The minfree space is not shown as available space in
the df command since it is not available to the user. Traditionally
this has been 10% of the drive space and is a tunable parameter.
Traditionally when a filesystem is created on a disk the amount of
minfree and the number of inodes, etc. is set. On some systems this
can be changed with the tunefs command. (Tunefs has the famous man
page quote, "You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."
I am saying traditionally a lot because my memory of details of linux
is vague and I can't remember how things are set there. You would
need to read the documentation on the ext2 filesystem, which is most
likely the one you are using, to determine what the exact minfree
value is on your system. But regardless, I suggest you free up even
more disk space to preserve a minimum free value.
Bob
P.S. This is an advanced concept. Do not do this unless you
understand the ramifications. But you might try shifting data from /
to /home and symlinking it back so that it appears in the old location
but physically resides on the other disk. There are both good and bad
points here so do this at your own risk. But if you are totally stuck
that is one way out and I see that you have space there.
