Question

On one of test server, we observed the inode usage for the /var/lib/mysql is showing all zero’s. We are unable to understand this. df -i output is as below.

db04 ~ # df -i /var/lib//mysql/
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/drbd0                 0       0       0    -  /var/lib/mysql
db04 ~ # 

Is this acceptable this all zero’s case ?

Answer 1

What it probably means is that the filesystem you are using does not have inodes allocated from fixed-size regions.

Traditional unix filesystems allocate a certain amount of space at mkfs time to use for inode storage and can’t add more later, so running out of inodes is something you have to worry about, and df -i lets you check up on it. Some of the more recently designed filesystems (e.g. reiserfs) create inodes on demand so you can never run out of inodes before running out of disk space.

Filesystems that were not originally designed for unix (e.g. vfat) don’t have inodes at all.