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Space management considerations

Several operations, such as removing or overwriting a file, can fail when a file system containing Storage Checkpoints runs out of space. If the system cannot allocate sufficient space, the operation will fail.

Database applications usually preallocate storage for their files and may not expect a write operation to fail. If a file system runs out of space, the kernel automatically removes Storage Checkpoints and attempts to complete the write operation after sufficient space becomes available. The kernel removes Storage Checkpoints to prevent commands, such as rm. from failing under an out-of-space (ENOSPC) condition.

See the rm(1m) manual page.

When the kernel automatically removes the Storage Checkpoints, it applies the following policies: