ext4: Running out of inodes [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Is there a way to solve this without creating and copying to a new partition

Nope, the number of inodes is fixed when the filesystem is created as the man page says

Be warned that it is not possible to expand the number of inodes on a filesystem after it is created, so be careful deciding the correct value for this parameter.

Solution 2:

Mostly no, but in your case you have used LVM and there is a LV (Logical Volume) for home.

If you run pvdisplay and look for "free extents" it may be possible run lvexpand to increase the size of the home LV, and then run resize2fs

Downside is you'll only add inodes at the same rate as the current filesyste already has.

What you need to do is find which directory has a lot of files, and decide if you need them

A 0-byte file will use an inode.

$ ls -la /home drwxr-xr-x 194 criggie criggie 28672 Sep 8 18:13 criggie drwxr-xr-x 2 statler statler 4096 Dec 13 2015 statler drwxr-xr-x 2 wakdorf waldorf 4096 Dec 21 2014 waldorf

Notice the 194 in the second column? This shows there are a lot of inodes in use in that directory. cd into that directory and repeat.

I suspect you have a temp directory or something with many thousands of small files, which can likely be purged.