As IT Pros, we have a myriad of tools available to us to configure and tweak and tune the systems we manage. So much so, there are often everyday tools right under our noses that might have applications we may not immediately realize. In a Linux environment, tune2fs is an indispensable tool, used to tune parameters on ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems. Most Linux sysadmins that have used mdadm software RAID will certainly recognize this utility if they’ve ever had to manipulate the stride size or stripe width in an array.

tune2fs

First, Let’s take a look at the disks on an Ubuntu file server so we can see what this tool does.

Now, we can use the tune2fs with the -l option to list the existing parameters of the filesystem superblock on /dev/sdb1.

Reserved Blocks?

As you can see, there are a number of parameters from the filesystem that we can view, including a number that can be tuned with tune2fs. In this article however, we’re going to focus on a rather simple and somewhat innocuous parameter – reserved block count. Let’s take a look at that parameter again:

At first glance, it isn’t obvious what this parameter means. In fact, I’ve worked with Linux sysadmins with years of experience that weren’t aware of this little gem. To understand this parameter, we probably have to put it’s origins in a bit of context. Once upon a time, SSDs didn’t exist, and no one knew what a terabyte was. In fact, I remember shelling out well north of a $100 for my first 20GB drive. To date myself even further, I remember the first 486-DX PC I built with my father in the early ’90s, and it’s drive was measured in megabytes. Crazy, I know. Since drive space wasn’t always so plentiful, and the consequences of running out of disk space on the root partition in a Linux system are numerous, early filesystem developers did something smart – they reserved a percentage of filesystem blocks for privileged processes. This ensured that even if disk space ran precariously low, the root user could still log in, and the system could still execute critical processes.

That magic number? Five percent.

And while five percent of that 20GB drive back in 1998 wasn’t very much space, imagine that new 4-disk RAID1/0 array you just created with 10TB WD Red Pros. That’s five percent of 20TB of usable space, or a full terabyte. You see, though this was likely intended for the root filesystem, by default this setting applies to every filesystem created. Now, I don’t know about you, but at $450 for a 10TB WD Red Pro, that’s not exactly space I’d want to throw away.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Reserved Blocks!

The good news, however, is that space isn’t lost forever. If you forget to initially set this parameter when you create the filesystem, tune2fs allows you to retroactively reclaim that space with the -m option.

Here you can see we’ve set the reserved blocks on /dev/sdb1 to 0%. Again, this isn’t something you’d want to do on a root filesystem, but for our “multimedia” drive, this is fine – more on that later. Now, let’s look at our filesystem parameters once again.

Notice now that our reserved blocks is set to zero. Finally, let’s have a look at our free disk space to see the real world impact. Initially, we had 50GB of 382GB free. Now we can see that, although neither the size of the disk nor the amount of used space has changed, we now have 69GB free, reclaiming 19GB of space.

Defrag Implications

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s one other function these reserved blocks serve. As always, in life there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or free space, in this case). The filesystem reserved blocks also serve to provide the system with free blocks with which to defragment the filesystem. Clearly, this isn’t something you’d want to do on a filesystem that contained a database, or in some other situation in which you had a large number of writes and deletions. However, if like in our case, you’re dealing with mostly static data, in a write once, read many (WORM) type configuration, this shouldn’t have a noticeable impact. In fact, the primary developer for tune2fs, Google’s Theodore Ts’o, can be seen here confirming this supposition.

So there you have it. You may be missing out on some valuable space, especially in those multi-terabyte arrays out there. And though it’s no longer 1998, and terabytes do come fairly cheap these days, it’s still nice to know you’re getting all that you paid for.