Can't install FreeBSD-amd64-9.0-RC2: "/mnt: out of inodes"

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Olivier Cochard-Labbé wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I tried to install FreeBSD-9.0-RC2-amd64-dvd1.iso (SHA256 verified) on
> a VM and meet a reproducible problem:
> The VM has 128Mo RAM and a 4Go hard drive.
>
> During install process I choose these distribution sets: ports and src only.
> And I'm using guided partitioning / Entire Disk / All Auto
>
> But each time (I delete and re-create a new VM multiple times) the
> installer failed during archive extraction of ports.txz (at about 88%
> progress of this file extraction) with this message:
>
> Error while extracting ports.txz:
> Can't create
> 'usr/ports/databases/p5-DBIx-Sunny/pkg-plist'
>
> And on the background there is this message:
> ...on /mnt: out of inodes
>
> Can someone else confirm this problem before I fill a PR ?

A 4G disk is perhaps quite rare these days, but I expect that the issue is 
real.  Please file the PR.

The default block and fragment size for UFS/FFS were bumped by mckusick in 
r222319 (to general assent); presumably the installer should gain some 
logic to use smaller values for smaller disks, so that the available 
number of inodes is larger.  (I presume that you have successfully 
installed earlier releases on 4G disk, of course.  Though ... I think I 
may have, myself.)  The ports tree has a very large number of small files, 
and is thus a very intensive user of inodes.


Alas, my five minutes of searching were not enough to find where 
bsdinstall is actually generating default filesystem options, so I 
couldn't confirm this assumption.

Thanks for the report,

Ben Kaduk