Re: XFS holding onto disk memory

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxx>]

> Is this expected behavior?  Is there a way to recover the on disk memory
> without unmounting the filesystem?

XFS dynamically allocates inodes as they are requested, but they are
never freed.  Even unmounting won't get this back for you.

So if you fill your disk with 0-length files, the space allocated
for inodes will always & forever be allocated for those inodes.

(compare this to ext2, where inode space is permanently allocated
at mkfs time).

You can use xfs_growfs to change the % of the disk which can be used
for inodes, though.

-Eric