I'm trying to figure out how much space I really need to give to an
OpenSolaris installation.  So far the answer is "more".  I don't feel
like I've installed a huge amount beyond what was on the 2008.05 CD -
mainly just development tools.  After upgrading to b92 then b93, then
cleaning up old boot environments I see the following:

# beadm list

BE            Active Active on Mountpoint Space
Name                 reboot               Used
----          ------ --------- ---------- -----
opensolaris-2 yes    yes       /          5.93G

Thinking that it seemed like a lot of space, I started hunting.

# du -kd / > du-kd
# sort -n du-kd | tail
329853  /var/crash
336334  /usr/X11/lib
383418  /usr/X11
646489  /usr/share
849528  /usr/lib
1612080 /var/pkg/download
1859417 /var/pkg
2457520 /var
2742977 /usr
5564108 

I've got a core that will free up 300 MB - and /var/pkg is taking up
1.8 GB.  Perhaps /var/pkg/download could be shared (ala /var/share
proposal) between boot environments so as to reduce the size of each
boot environment, thus preventing ENOSPC on BE activation.  More on
that in a minute.  Is this orphaned data or is it somehow useful?

I noticed that du-kd took a very long time as well - a sign of a huge
number of files or directories.  pkg is to blame for 87% of the
directories.

# wc -l du-kd
   69834 du-kd
# grep /var/pkg du-kd| wc -l
   61175
# grep /var/pkg/download du-kd| wc -l
   58310

The real impact of this is that I repeatedly run into troubles
activating new boot environments.  Based upon feedback I've received
so far[1], it seems as though in order to activate a new boot
environment the pool needs to have as much free space (AVAIL) as is
used (not sure if it is USED or REFER) by the currently active boot
environment.  In other words, the new packaging environment is only
likely to work if you have 66% free space in your root pool before you
start an image-update.  Actually it is not quite that bad, but there
seems to be no simple way to tell someone how much extra free space
they will need to be well-prepared for "pkg image-update".  The best
simple estimate is likely something along the lines of '2x the size of
the current boot environment reported by "beadm status".'

1.http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2008-June/007159.html

In my previous efforts, I bricked my (virtual) system trying to mirror
to a larger virtual disk.  Now, after re-installing to the larger disk
(12 GB) I don't think that I will be able to active my next boot
environment.  In trying to image-update to snv_94, I hit a new
show-stopper[2].

2.http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2714

So far it seems as though the lower bound for having a manageable
installation is about 20 GB.  But then again, I though that 12 GB
would be plenty (especially since I moved all non-OS data into a
separate zpool).  While it is true that hard drives smaller than 60 GB
are hard to find these days, this is not the case for virtualized
environments, thumb drives, or other SSD devices.

-- 
Mike Gerdts
http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
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