[jiml8]

Has anyone seen this one?

My Home partition is gradually losing space. This isn't due to any mysterious files being written; it looks more like space is being allocated and never freed. The consequence is that eventually the partition is reported as full even though there should be about 5 Gigs available.

The only thing I have been able to do is unmount and remount it, at which time all space is restored. I seem to need to do this every few weeks, which requires me to shut down my X session, log in as root, switch to runlevel 1, unmount/remount the partition, then restart my X session and log back in. Very annoying.

The system is mostly Mandriva 10.2 but with the 2.6.8 kernel from 10.1. KDE 3.3.2. The file system is ext3 and I don't see the effect on any other partition.

Any ideas?

[lynch]

Maybe run fsck next time you are in linux 1, before you remount the partition? See what that may turn up. Unless you already have.
lynch

[jiml8]

I did all the obvious things, including scrolling the entire contents of the partition off to another location, reformatting, and reloading the partition.

This is some subtle problem with an incompatibility someplace; I must have improper versions of some libraries someplace. No idea where though and the logs aren't helping me.

I was rather hoping that someone had seen something similar before...

[jiml8]

Solved.

The problem was .xsession-errors in my home directory.

I run kplayer quite a bit and it is chatty, writing lots of debug stuff into .xsession-errors. At one point in the distant past I discovered that and solved the problem by occasionally shutting down kplayer then deleting .xsession-errors.

After some library and KDE upgrades (from 3.2.4 to 3.3.2), it seems that kdeinit is holding .xsession-errors open all the time, even if it isn't writing. Also, when you delete a file that is open, it turns out that ext3 reports the file as successfully deleted, but it isn't because there was an open file handle on it, and therefore applications will continue to write to it.

So what was happening was that I deleted .xsession-errors and ext3 agreed it was gone -but it wasn't since kdeinit was holding it open. Then kplayer proceeded to fill up my hard drive.

Current workaround; .xsession-errors has been replaced with a link to /dev/null, and root owns the link. I don't know if this will survive a reboot or not; if it doesn't I'll put some code in the initscripts.

So, the bugs are as follows:

(1) kplayer should have debug messages turned off.
(2) kdeinit shouldn't hold a file open unless it is writing to it.
(3) ext3 should do one or another of the following: (a) refuse to delete an open file, or (b) delete the file and invalidate all open file handles.