Root partition size too small for FreeBSD 10.1?

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Sat, January 24, 2015 11:04 am, Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:
> I have a server I tried to upgrade to 10.1-RELEASE and it gave me out of
> disk space errors when it came time at the end to making changes to
> /boot/kernel. I reverted the snapshot taken on this VPS back to 8.4 for
> now. The root partition is 85% used of a 500MB, and since more than half
> the used space is in /boot/kernel, I think its the new kernel size that
> is the issue and the root partition will have to grow? If that is the
> case, I would have to make some room....
>
> root at www:/usr/local/etc # df -h
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
> /dev/da0s1a 484M 378M 67M 85% /
> devfs 1.0k 1.0k 0B 100% /dev
> /dev/da0s1d 9.5G 1.6G 7.1G 18% /usr
> /dev/da0s1e 9.2G 2.7G 5.7G 32% /var
> /dev/da1s1 19G 4.0G 13G 23% /www
>
> Looking at the handbook, perhaps I could use the swap to extend the root
> partition and resize /var to add swap back in single user mode? And
> would that be enough space, still less than 1GB.
>
> root at www:/usr/local/etc # gpart show da0
> =>      63  41942977  da0  MBR  (20G)
>          63  41929587    1  freebsd  [active]  (20G)
>    41929650     13390       - free -  (6.6M)
>
> root at www:/usr/local/etc # gpart show da0s1
> =>       0  41929587  da0s1  BSD  (20G)
>           0   1024000      1  freebsd-ufs  (500M)
>     1024000    524288      2  freebsd-swap  (256M)
>     1548288  20480000      4  freebsd-ufs  (9.8G)
>    22028288  19901299      5  freebsd-ufs  (9.5G)
>
> Thanks for any help or pointers...?
>
One thing I have learned over the time is: all systems from release to
release demand more and more disk space (some want slightly more, others,
like MS Windows or latest Linux releases, almost twice as much). FreeBSD
is on decent side here, still, if you originally planned your / partition
somewhere around FreeBSD 6, and were just upgrading system in place, at
the level of FreeBSD 10 you will have / too small in size, and even if you
succeed upgrading it in place, your / partition is too small to allow you
to maintain FreeBSD 10 hassle free in a long run. My take would be: either
mirror current system on new drive with larger partitions, then upgrade
that, or build FreeBSD 10 fresh, then migrate all from older system to it.
When I was building my workstation I used 2 GB /, others may give better
advises on most suitable partition sizes.

Valeri

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++