[SOLVED] What facts affect the size of the inode list when configuring a file system?

Hi,I'm reading the book,<the degsin of the unix operating system>,in chapter 2 the author says that : 'The inode list is a list of inodes that follows the super block in the file system.
Administrators specify the size of the Mode list when configuring a file system. '
I am not understand how the Administrators configuring the size of the inode list. what facts will affect the size of it? Does the size will be dead(will not be changed any more) once be setted up?

Hi,I'm reading the book,<the degsin of the unix operating system>,in chapter 2 the author says that : 'The inode list is a list of inodes that follows the super block in the file system.
Administrators specify the size of the Mode list when configuring a file system. '
I am not understand how the Administrators configuring the size of the inode list. what facts will affect the size of it? Does the size will be dead(will not be changed any more) once be setted up?

see man mke2fs (or something similar) to see how a filesystem can be created.

The admin can specify inodes, but the defaults are calculated for most use cases based on filesystem size. Let it default.
And yes, the number of inodes is fixed.

Originally Posted by syg00 The admin can specify inodes, but the defaults are calculated for most use cases based on filesystem size. Let it default. And yes, the number of inodes is fixed.

OK,I see.I'm just worried about if there are no sufficient inodes for using or if there are more inodes than actually needed that results in wasting some disk storage spaces.

Originally Posted by syg00 The admin can specify inodes, but the defaults are calculated for most use cases based on filesystem size. Let it default. And yes, the number of inodes is fixed.

And another quesion is what does the 'man' means in linux or unix? I dont think it reffers to man which opposes to woman.
Thank you.

man is manual, this is a linux/unix command to print the manual page of tools (and others).

Originally Posted by pan64 man is manual, this is a linux/unix command to print the manual page of tools (and others).

Ah,I see. Thank you.

Originally Posted by Yuc OK,I see.I'm just worried about if there are no sufficient inodes for using or if there are more inodes than actually needed that results in wasting some disk storage spaces.

I-nodes are not all that large (often 256 bytes) and as creating extra I-nodes is a no-no the various mkfs utilities tend to make excessive amounts of them rather than having too little:

 -i bytes-per-inode
              Specify the bytes/inode ratio.  mke2fs creates an inode for every
              bytes-per-inode bytes of space on the disk.
              The larger the bytes-per-inode ratio, the fewer inodes will be created.
              This value generally shouldn't be smaller than the blocksize of the
              filesystem, since in that case more inodes would be made than can ever
              be used.  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.

The default, for ext? fs'es, is defined in /etc/mke2fs.conf (which can be configured by your distro, but often is something like 8192 or 16384, which, with a blocksize of 4K, means 1 I-node for every 2 or 4 diskblocks, so assumes a very low average size of your files).

There may be niche cases, with very distinctive sizes of files across the filesystem (e.g. a huge number of very small files or a small number of very large files), where you might want to define the number of inodes for performance purposes, but in general the default value on filesystem creation is perfectly fine.