UFS2 partition with negative used space

[David Adam]

(The mail to this node is rather slow, so I'm sure someone else will have
replied by now.)

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Jean-Yves Lefort wrote:
> Filesystem                             Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad0s1e                            989M    -46M    956M    -5%    /var/tmp
>
> Any hints?

Yep: delete some files on /var/tmp. :-)

If you're asking 'how can I have negative disk space?', you might want to
read newfs(8) and tunefs(8), particularly the sections dealing with the
-m flag.

Basically, FreeBSD reserves 8% of the disk by default for maintenance
reasons: it prevents fragmentation, among other things. The super-user can
override these limitations, but it's a bad idea for any length of time.

(I think I'm going to tell other Windows people that it just shows how
much more efficient BSD is with your disk space.)

Cheers,

David Adam
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au