Subject: netfilter is not a filesystem

From: Andrew Morton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:11:19 -0800

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:55:26 GMT
[email-masked] wrote:

> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28862
> 
>            Summary: /proc/net/ip_conntrack: no space left on device
>                     systematically

This is why I'm forever nagging people to not just grab some errno
because its name happens to sound similar to the error you just detected.

Yes, it superficially seems nice and logical for netfilter to use
ENOSPC when it runs out of space.  But when that error code propagates
up to the user, they see "no space left on device" and will then run
"df" and wonder what the hell happened to their computer.

The kernel makes this mistake a *lot*.  EFBIG in the rtc drivers?  Really?