Subject: Re: Further modem troubles, et al., and a Quantum question
To: The Great Mr. Kurtz \[David A. Gatwood\] <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>
From: John F. Woods <jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 10/11/1996 19:37:31
> > Checking with fsck showed no problems, and I can still create files.  'df',
> > however, shows me at 109% capacity, even though fewer blocks are marked
> > used than are marked available.

> Basically, NetBSD designates about ten percent of a partition's space as a
> buffer zone so that the kernel can do such things as defragmenting the
> partition and stuff.  Only root can use the extra space, and it's _highly_
> discouraged to do so.  Your best bet would be to move stuff to
> another partition to get that number down to 90 or so, 80 would be even
> better.  (90 would really mean 9/11 or approx. 82% used, 80 would mean
> 8/11 or approx. 73% used.)  Regardless, in order for things to work
> correctly, you _must_ drop it below 100% (realy 90% full or so.

If this is a partition where you do not care about performance, you can use
"tunefs -m 0 ..." to set the minfree parameter to 0.  However, as the manual
page warns,

             This value can be set to zero, however up to a factor of
             three in throughput will be lost over the performance ob-
             tained at a 10% threshold. 

However, I routinely do this for filesystems used for bulk storage and
archival, where performance is less importance than capacity.