mm: tmpfs: huge=always Kconfig help understates severe space amplification (follow up)
From: Artem S. Tashkinov
Date: Sat Oct 31 2026 - 11:22:33 EST
Hi Dmitry,
One additional observation concerning diagnostic tools:
In this situation, ordinary du reports 45 GiB for a tree containing only 1.4 GiB of apparent data.
Although this is technically correct allocation accounting, it makes identifying the cause quite difficult. Both df and du show an almost full filesystem, while neither explains that huge-page allocation overhead is responsible for most of the consumption.
Only comparing du against du --apparent-size exposed the scale of the discrepancy.
This reinforces the need for explicit Kconfig documentation: users investigating unexpectedly exhausted tmpfs filesystems may reasonably conclude that they have accumulated excessive data, rather than recognising that the selected allocation policy is consuming vastly more space than the contents require.
I am not suggesting that GNU du is itself defective. Rather, this is a diagnostic trap worth documenting alongside the configuration option.
Regards,
Artem