Bug 192110

Summary: Disk space monitor should offer "dangerously full" notification
Product: [Unmaintained] plasma4 Reporter: Stephan Sokolow <kde_bugzilla_2>
Component: widget-systemmonitorAssignee: Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: major CC: kde-2011.08, lamarque, richih-kde
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Compiled Sources   
OS: Unspecified   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Stephan Sokolow 2009-05-09 11:28:51 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE 4.2.2)
Installed from:    Compiled From Sources

The disk space plasmoid should offer some kind of visual notification (eg. red tint to the meter) when a drive is overfull. (User-configurable by MiB/GiB count or percentage... but GiB count MUST be an option if per-drive limit configuration isn't an option. 10% of 500GiB on the root partition and 10% of 200GiB on the inbound torrents partition are very different things)
Comment 1 Dotan Cohen 2009-11-29 13:53:42 UTC 
Agreed. Some operating systems such as OSX and Windows tell the user when his hard disk or allocated disk space is nearing full.
Comment 2 Lamarque V. Souza 2011-02-09 21:48:53 UTC 
*** Bug 265928 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Richard Hartmann 2011-02-09 21:52:00 UTC 
Lamarque: Why did you merge those two items?

One is a request for a prior warning, the other is the system silently losing data.

I agree that they are very much related, but I can't see the reasoning behind this merge.
Comment 4 Lamarque V. Souza 2011-02-09 22:09:55 UTC 
The solution is the same: to warn the user the disk is getting full.

In Unix/Linux systems when the disk gets full unpredictable things can happen with the programs, losing data is one of them. If the system reaches that point there is nothing we can do because even recovering programs need resources like disk space to do their jobs. It is up to the user try to recover the system. The best we can do is warn the user before that happens.
Comment 5 Richard Hartmann 2011-02-09 22:14:25 UTC 
Warning before something bad happens and having said bad thing happen are two different stages.

In any case, I don't understand why this is wishlist when you yourself admit that it can lead to data loss.
Comment 6 Lamarque V. Souza 2011-02-09 22:32:27 UTC 
That is why I said that *after* the disk is full there is nothing we can do, that includes the ENOSPC errors. The best we can do is warn the user before the system starts to send ENOSPC messages.

I can split the bugs up again, but the reality is that nobody can solve that bug for good in software alone. The user have to act to help the system to recover from out of disk space. One thing that must be done is closing the software that is causing the disk to be full, like the ookiller in the Linux kernel does when RAM memory is falling short. But if you have heard of ookiller you must have also  heard that it does not always "shot" the right program.
Comment 7 Richard Hartmann 2011-02-10 02:14:35 UTC 
True, KDE can not do much to fix the situation once the disk is full, but still one is a warning and one is an error.

Thanks for splitting them again.
Comment 8 Aaron J. Seigo 2011-07-30 18:26:14 UTC 
there is a disk full service that comes with plasma workspaces now.