bin/162659: Can' t install FreeBSD-amd64-9.0-RC2 on disk less than 6Go (/mnt: out of inodes)

[Bruce Evans]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011, Bruce Evans wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Dec 2011, [ISO-8859-1] Olivier Cochard-Labbé wrote:
>
>> The following reply was made to PR bin/162659; it has been noted by GNATS.
>
> THe following reply probably won't be noted by gnats, since gnats
> created an incomplete Cc list as usual.
>
>> I've did some tests: The number of inode after a fresh install of
>> 9.0-RC2 is half the number of inode after the fresh install of a 8.2.
>> I've install a 6Gio hard drive, MBR, no swap partition and all in /
>> (under VirtualBox).
>
> 9.0 has the dubious change of increasing the default block size in
> newfs from 16K to 32K (and, correspondingly, increasing the default
> fragment size from 2K to 4K).  It is missing the corresponding change
> of increasing the number of fragments per inode (NFPI) from 4 to 8.

That should be "reducing ... (NFPI) from 4 to 2".

> Thus if you blindly accept the newfs defaults, you get half as many
> inodes as before.

I forget to mention than newfs on a regular file to verify this is
quite broken.  You now have to write a label to the regular file,
since the usual mechanisms for specifying the geometry when there
is no label (-S sector-size -s size or even -Tfoo) no longer work.
I want to use the usual mechanisms and not mess around with labels.

There are relatively minor documentation bugs related to this.  -S,
-s and -T are still documented, but after removal of many geometry-
related options near -S, there are plural references to the single -S
option and other anachronisms related to geometry, which together
result in the description of -S being mostly wrong.  Also, -s is
arguably a geometry option but it is not in the geometry section.  The
geometry section with only -S in it makes -S unsorted relative to the
other -[AZ] options.

Bruce