AIX 1.3 Space Requirements

Rick Ekblaw wrote:
   If you've been following the AIX 1.3 saga so far, you may be wondering, "How big are all of those optional IBM Licensed Program Products?"  Well, I'll try to answer that question.

   First, a review:  The AIX 1.3 installation process will create six minidisks in the AIX data partition, and the size of the AIX data partition is the concatenation of the size of those six minidisks.  An AIX boot partition is also created, and that is a little larger than 3MB.  If you accept the default hostname of aixps2, the names of the filesystems are:  /u, /aixps2, /, /aixps2/tmp.  The page minidisk and the
dump minidisk do not have filesystems on them, they are used for virtual memory paging activity and system core dumps, respectively. 

Default Install
   Using the SCSI boot diskettes with the Install diskette, the default sizes of the minidisks are as follows:

Disk            Size in 1K blocks       Number of inodes
/u              9824                    982
/aixps2         7704                    770
/               42000                   4200
page            4000                    * (used for swapping)
dump            4000                    * (no files unless a dump occurs)
/aixps2/tmp     5804                    580

With this configuration, you would need at least an 80MB hard drive (don't forget the space required for the AIX boot partition and your system partition).  The smallest drive I was using was 540MB.

1GB HD Install
   After I finished Louis' "master drive", I decided to re-do my 1GB SCSI drive, and allocated the minidisks as follows:

Disk            Size in 1K blocks       Number of FILES 
/u              307200                  30720
/aixps2         65536                   6553
/               307200                  30720
page            131072
dump            49152
/aixps2/tmp     102400                  10240

   This gives 300MB for user files (/u), 64MB for "system" files (/aixps2), 300MB for programs, system data files (/), 128MB for paging space (with 32MB of RAM, this should be more than enough), 48MB for dump space, and 100MB for system temp files (/aixps2/tmp).
 

   After the base installation (all of the Basic Operating System diskettes loaded, and the system rebooted), here's how the file system space looked:

Filesystem      Total Blocks    Blocks free     Inodes used
/u              291832          291828          3
/aixps2         62248           60188           287
/               291832          276172          1149
/aixps2/tmp     97272           97268           5

   You can see the effect of system overhead (mostly space for the inodes) on the total number of blocks available for use in each filesystem, and you'll note that most of the files (and blocks consumed) were in the root filesystem.

LPP Filesystem Space Requirements
Here's a picture of the filesystems after I installed all of the optional LPPs that I had available:

Filesystem      Total Blocks    Blocks free     Inodes used
/u              291832          291828          3
/aixps2         62248           52856           537
/               291832          188152          9182
/aixps2/tmp     97272           97192           12

   At this point, I had five "old" system kernels in the /aixps2 filesystem, each consuming about 1.6MB, so if I deleted all of the "dead" kernels, I could boost the free space in /aixps2 by almost 8000 blocks.  Hence, the installed LPPs took almost all of their space out of the root filesystem, to the tune of 86MB.  Next, I will list the number of blocks of the root filesystem consumed by the installation of each LPP:

LPP                             Number of blocks (/)
CDRom Support                   228
Administrative Support          468
Learn                           2208
Manual Pages                    8364
Adv. Dev. Support Tools         7372
Src Code Control Sys            308
Async Terminal Emul             196
Basic Network Util              604
Merge w/DOS 5.0 Support         2772
I386 English Catalogs           828
Extended User Support           1296
Games                           312
Graphics Support Library        3044
INed                            2040
Interactive Network & Mail      620
Internal Tape Device Driver     88
I386 Japanese Catalogs          896
Message Handler                 2928
HighC Compiler                  1344
AIXWindows                      5088
Network File System             424
DOS Server                      588
Sample Programs                 248
TCP/IP                          1452
Text Formatting System          1696
X Windows                       16940
X Fonts                         3344
X Windows Prog. Examples        8596
IBM Image Adapter Driver        388
X Manual Pages                  2512
XStation Manager                3440
AIXWindows Desktop              3844

   If you're wondering what happened to the X.25 subsystem support, it turns out that the 2nd diskette image for X.25 is actually another copy of the 2nd diskette image for TCP/IP... so I could not successfully install X.25.  The files that loaded from the first diskette consumed 1540 blocks.  Also, the Advanced Development Tools actually fit on 5 diskettes, the 6th image in that set is SCCS (Source Code Control System).

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