[SOLVED] - IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

I'm getting this message every time I try to emerge. My first instinct is to think that one of my disk partitions is full, but they aren't.

Here's an example:

chithanh · Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 2:13 am Post subject:

You may be out of inodes, especially if you use ext3/4 with many small files (e.g. portage tree). Check with

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

chithanh · Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 2:19 am Post subject:

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

Okay. Can I change that in a configuration file somewhere? I'm not sure how it got there, unless that's default. I followed the manual closely, but this is still my first gentoo build so I'm sure there are things (like this) that I didn't do correctly. It seems strange to me that this would suddenly happen after many months of stability, but maybe there's a relevant config file that needs to be updated.

chithanh · Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 2:23 am Post subject:

You can change the maximum tmpfs size with the size=... parameter (in fstab or mount -o remount,size=...).
Note that if you hit swap because your tmpfs grows too large, performance will be worse than if you didn't use tmpfs at all.

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

I doubled it, and I don't think there's any risk of it running into swap if I'm working with space in my root filesystem... but maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

So is this a normal problem that everyone runs into? From the way you were describing it, it sounded like I shouldn't have my temporary portage files there.

edit: Wait, do you mean physical memory as in RAM? In that case, 3000 MB would be bad.

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

In any case, thanks for your help. I'm a lot closer to understanding what's going on, even if I don't completely understand it. I guess my only question is whether changing the size of tmpfs is the best option, and if so what you think the best size would be on my system

codestation · Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 2:39 am Post subject:

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

I actually went back and forth between the manual and a guide my friend (a CS whiz, afaik) had put together. It must have been something he decided to do. Since you mentioned the amount of RAM, I have 4GB. Nothing crazy.

Anyway, I get this in the beginning of the compile:

Aquous · l33t Joined: 08 Jan 2011 Posts: 619

Libreoffice is a huge program, it's to be expected to require massive space to compile (source code alone is probably around 1 GB in size, add to that object files, debug symbol files, etc produced during compilation...)

titanofold · Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 11:12 am Post subject:

Yeah, the default location of /var/tmp/portage is not on a tmpfs. It is actually on your hard drive or wherever you've decided to place the /var directory.

If you have gobs of RAM, a tmpfs can be beneficial, but in your case it's holding you back.
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arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

In what file can I find that setting (i.e. location of /var/tmp/portage)? I've commented out the tmpfs line in my fstab, but I assume I also need to tell portage to relocate that directory. But then again, maybe not.

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

I think I may end up having a problem anyway. My root partition is only 15GB, of which about 10 is currently used. Knew I should have made it higher, now it seems I'll have no choice but to try a new install - and I really don't want to deal with that right now. But this was my first time with gentoo, so I'm sure the next iteration would turn out better. I guess for the time being I should just stick with abiword.

titanofold · Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 10:11 am Post subject:

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

Yeah, as I said I think I should probably do a new install. I'd already looked in make.conf and didn't see anything relevant. Should I be adding a line for the portage temp directory?

Also, I was going to comment out the tmpfs line because it didn't seem like it was supposed to be there (mount point is /var/tmp/portage). Should I be changing the mount point instead?

I plan to do a clean install of gentoo soon, but I'd like to understand this better so I don't make the same mistakes.

arcfxn · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2011 Posts: 74 Location: NY, USA

Well, I definitely learned something today. Didn't think make.conf would have a man page, but I discovered just that. Silly me.

To all who responded, thanks for the help. I'll continue working on this on my own.

DaBeaner · n00b Joined: 11 Apr 2012 Posts: 13

hey, I'm sorry, but I'm new to Gentoo as well. I attempted

Arkhelion · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2012 3:47 pm Post subject:

errr... that's the full one.
try it being root maybe? (though I can't see why it would need root priviledges)
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dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 2166 Location: Canada

Almost all, but not all packages can be emerged with portage build on tmpfs on 4GB machine. The exceptions are libreoffice, new firefox and thunderbird,
and maybe couple of others. These require exuberant amount of space for compilation, which can be problem even with a space on disk. I actually switched to bin packages of those monsters, especially with fast update cycles now for firefox and thunderbird.

DaBeaner · n00b Joined: 11 Apr 2012 Posts: 13

dmpogo. I don't understand exactly what you are trying to tell me I should do.

DaBeaner · n00b Joined: 11 Apr 2012 Posts: 13

sorry, just found it

DaBeaner · n00b Joined: 11 Apr 2012 Posts: 13

ok, so I went over a few things and this is what I have instead when I type df -i

chaseguard · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Jun 2004 Posts: 121

A snippet:

cat /etc/make.conf

PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/dev/shm
#PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/var/tmp
PORTDIR=/usr/portage
DISTDIR=${PORTDIR}/distfiles
PKGDIR=${PORTDIR}/packages

The tempdir is where portage will do the work of compiling your packages. The default is PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/var/tmp and this is on some disk drive.

As you see, I use PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/dev/shm and this is RAM memory, not on a disk. I find less disk thrashing and fast compile times using it.

Some packages (firefox, libreoffice, ...) will need more working space to compile. If you set portage to use RAM and this need exceeds your available RAM (some of which is already used by everything else in your system) then bad things can happen. Portage has an environment capability (/etc/portage/package.env) that will let you spell out where individual packages should be compiled if other than the location listed in /etc/make.conf.

None of this should be affected by your /etc/fstab which should already have something to create the RAM access:

none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

I suggest you use PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/var/tmp as this will never cause you a problem. If using tmpfs (RAM) is your thing, then study-up on portage environment capability and figure out which programs will be a problem for you in RAM and set them to run on the disk. With 4 gig or less you need be thoughtful, especially if you have competing memory users (like virtual machines).

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 2166 Location: Canada