Failed emerge taking up space when using tmpfs [solved]

mani001 · Guru Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 485 Location: Oleiros

I'm having some disk space problems in Gentoo (I didn't foresee I would need 20 GB in /) The thing is, I needed to install Virtualbox so I deleted some stuff...but that wasn't enough and emerge failed due to lack of disk space. However, after the failed emerge, I have less disk space left than before (about 4MB

)...and I don't get it since /var/tmp/portage is a tmpfs partition (i.e., the temporal files for the compilation should stay in memory...right?). Also, the failed emerge didn't get to the "install" part... So, is there any path where temporary stuff is saved prior to installation?

Cheers!!

Syl20 · l33t Joined: 04 Aug 2005 Posts: 619 Location: France

Are you sure the tmpfs is mounted on /var/tmp/portage ?
The "du" command should help you to know where to clean your system.

mani001 · Guru Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 485 Location: Oleiros

Yes, I'm sure /var/tmp is a "tmpfs". Also, during emerge I checked that the space on that partition was actually being used.

I know "du", but I don't think I can use it to find out now whether temporary stuff is in / somewhere (I don't know how much should weight every directory there).

Anyway, thanks for your quick reply.

freke · Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 11:02 am Post subject:

Failed emerges should be under /var/tmp/portage, unless you've used PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/somewhere" to point to elsewhere...
(ie. /etc/portage/package.env to tell packages to big for tmpfs to compile using hdd/sdd)

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749

I would check whether /var/tmp/portage in the original file system was really empty (you can use mount --bind / /some-directory to check the original content).
To check for recently created files, you can use the -newer option of find with some file in /var/tmp/portage (man find for details).
Also, you should be aware that the space of a deleted file is only freed if no process is still holding a handle of that file.

chithanh · Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 11:35 pm Post subject:

Maybe something was downloaded to the distfiles directory.
In addition, emerge writes logs when compiling (though it should be less than 4 MB for a package).

Also, depending on your filesystem, small files or certain write/delete patterns can reduce usable space more than the files itself occupy. This especially applies to btrfs.

enZom · n00b Joined: 13 Nov 2015 Posts: 30 Location: In a sandbox

Does FEATURES="fail-clean" still clean out failed data?

make.conf

mani001 · Guru Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 485 Location: Oleiros

mv,

there is nothing in the "real" /var/tmp/portage (I "umount /var/tmp/portage" to check)

chithanh,

I didn't know about that. I'm using ext4

enZom,

interesting

I'll give it a try

Anyway, I lost patience and ended up moving the whole /usr/portage to a different partition (that way I gained more than 1GB and it was enough). So, I didn't get to find out what the problem was. One possible hypothesis, though, is that "emerge" starts copying files to the file system before the printing out "installing" on the screen...yes, a little bit far fetched :-/

I'm marking this as solved, although I don't really know what was the problem at those specific emerges.

Thank you all!!

EDIT: ...a little late, but for what's worth the culprit was /var/tmp/ccache