/boot is full after running "make installkernel" on FreeBSD 8.0

[Arthur Chance]

On 07/02/10 15:38, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:04:10 +0100
> Arthur Chance<freebsd at qeng-ho.org>  wrote:
>
>> As a matter of idle curiosity with a bit of education thrown in, why
>> 4GB for /var? The last time I installed a new machine I made / 1GB as
>> I'd found out from a previous install that 512MB wasn't really
>> enough, and then decided to make /var bigger than the Handbook said
>> as well and made it 3GB. This has turned out to be total overkill:
>>
>> arthur at fileserver>  df -h /var
>> Filesystem      Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
>> /dev/ad10s1d    2.9G    205M    2.5G     8%    /var
>>
>> I'm sure my use of this machine is very simple and nowhere near as
>> large as other people's but a leap of 4-16 times what it currently
>> suggests in the Handbook seems a bit excessive, especially if people
>> are installing onto older kit. OTOH, playing devil's advocate with
>> myself, disks are huge these days so why not?
>>
>
> I came up with that value based on discussion on IRC. I also thought
> that portsnap might take up quite a bit more than it actually does. It
> perhaps doesn't need updated from its current value.

I suspect whoever you were talking to probably has more of a clue than I 
do. As a quick data point, I just ran "portsnap fetch update" while 
another process did a "df /var; sleep 1" loop and /var increased by 
about 30MB at its peak. That was a week after the last port update. I've 
no idea how much space a "portsnap fetch extract" would take and would 
rather not do one right now. Similarly I've no idea how much 
freebsd-update might take.