Re: [Libguestfs] [PATCH] make-fs: Don't use du --apparent-size to estimate input size.

> I think it's a difficult problem and one which won't be solved using > du. For comparison we have some nbdkit plugins for creating > filesystems and they are far more sophisticated, especially this one: > https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/tree/master/plugins/floppy > > I would note that the reason the test fails was nothing to do with > free space. It was actually running out of inodes. With ext2/3/4 the > number of inodes in the metadata is fixed at creation and based on the > size of the disk (see /etc/mke2fs.conf inode_ratio and the mke2fs -i > and -N options). Because of the small size of the disk, mke2fs was > choosing < 100 inodes, but because the test had 100+ files it failed > when creating the later files even though there was enough disk space. > There's no easy way to fix this. I think it could even be considered > as a bug in mke2fs. > > Rich. I've did extra testing and the issue really appears for small file systems composed from 100 x 10-bytes files or so because of lack of free inodes. Nevertheless we cannot swear that virt-make-fs will work for any possible file systems or set of files.--size=+N is for the rescue in such cases. Your patch made things worse because of sparse files. I think we cannot apply it.