running mke2fs with limited memory

Question

I'm working on a computer with very little memory (128MB) - for my application I need to format large drives (4TB)

I'm able to format greater than 2TB disks, up to about 2.5TB, but beyond that I'm given the below

mke2fs 1.42-WIP (16-Oct-2011)
/dev/sda1: Memory allocation failed while setting up superblock

I realize I'm really out there in terms of reasonable - are there any tricks? (block sizes, etc)

any idea how I can get very large disks to format?

Put some more RAM in it. – Michael Hampton Sep 28 '12 at 00:39 — Michael Hampton, Sep 28 '12 at 00:39

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '12 at 22:51

Add some swap: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-add-a-swap-file-howto/

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=524288
mkswap /swapfile1
swapon /swapfile1

That'll make 512MB of swap and enable it. You'll need to edit your /etc/fstab to make it stay after a reboot, though.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 20 '15 at 22:55

1

An even better approach would be to use the -D flag. From the man pages:

 Use direct I/O when writing to the  disk.   This  avoids  mke2fs
 dirtying  a  lot  of buffer cache memory, which may impact other
 applications running on a busy server.  This option  will  cause
 mke2fs  to run much more slowly, however, so there is a tradeoff
 to using direct I/O.

Worked for me with an initramfs and 512MB.

answered Aug 20 '15 at 22:55

Nate

21
2

1

Better than what? This is unlikely to solve the problem shown in the question. – Michael Hampton Aug 20 '15 at 23:09
2

This is better than adding swap space. Also, it's better than "Put some more RAM in it." :-) (albeit probably slower) – Nate Aug 26 '15 at 16:40
This solved my issue with the same error message on a Raspberry pi. Thank you! – Michael Sep 21 '22 at 17:10

running mke2fs with limited memory

2 Answers2