"pkg: out of space" on mostly empty CF card
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I'm trying to move my machine from 24.03 to 24.11, and it always stops on step 46, the amd microcode package. I get an alert in the GUI saying "pkg: out of space returned code 3," but my storage is almost entirely empty (no old snapshots laying around, just the currently booted one). I did the pre-upgrade reboot, but no luck. Here's the breakdown of my storage - I let the installer make the choices since I didn't need anything special on this box. Any thoughts?
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Are you really running from a Compact Flash card?
It should be fine unless it's damaged. Partially read-only perhaps.
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@stephenw10 not by choice on this machine. It's remote, and has been reliable for some time (I use ramdisk for /var and /tmp, although I disabled it here in case that was the issue). I'm kind of at a loss as to how to troubleshoot it since I don't normally work with CF-card based systems.
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There's nothing really very special about CF cards in terms of handling. They are usually very slow because they are IDE and often not even UDMA. They often don't have the same wear leveling which can be an issue.
It's possible the card itself is hitting a wear limit. I would usually recommend installing as UFS with RAM disks when running from an actual flash card to reduce drive writes.
It might not be though. You can try grading from the command line and see if it throws any other errors:
pfSense-upgrade -dIf it is a problem with the card I would expect to see a bunch of drive errors when it hits it. It could be on the console only though if it;s not able to log it.
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@stephenw10 I tried this, and there were zero errors reported, the process just stopped at the same point. I got onsite and tried a fresh install, and it didn't work either, so I'm assuming the card is cashed and have ordered a new one. If this device had power for a SATA drive I'd swap the CF card for one, but... oh well.
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Hmm, that's odd failure mode. Usually the drives just stop responding entirely or go read-only. But I'm not sure I've seen a CF card that large.
Anyway I recommend UFS and RAM disks unless you have some packages that don't play nice with ram disks.
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@stephenw10 Thanks. I had been using ramdisks for /tmp and /var, but disabled them for the upgrade's sake. It's some kind of heavy-duty embedded system one with UDMA7 and everything, but it's likely pretty old at this point so swapping it seems prudent. What's the motivation in this case behind UFS as opposed to ZFS?
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It's drive writes. ZFS writes a lot more to the disk doing anything. With UFS and ram disks the drive write are close to zero unless you are actively writing out logs etc.
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Got it. Thanks for the advice!
