Xen is fun. Now I can actually see what all the other OS flavours out there are up to without "real" rebooting or disk juggling. Of course, at some point it was time for Gentoo again, last time I tried I was highly impressed, but got distracted by Debian somehow :-) Anyway, Gentoo documentation is usually pretty good, straightforward and with real-world examples - so far so good. But after unpacking the portage tree, I was getting "No space left on device" errors. Well, tbh 2 GB for rootfs is not that much, especially when most of the software will be built from source anyway, but I still had ~700MB free. Of course I was out of inodes:

# tar -tjf portage-latest.tar.bz2 | wc -l
130502
# tar -tjf stage3-amd64-2008.0.tar.bz2 | wc -l
40362
# df -i .
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             125184  125184       0  100% /mnt/gentoo

Recreating the filesystem with mkfs.ext3 -b 1024 -i 1024 did help. Gentoo ships with /etc/mke2fs.conf where these defaults were taken from. While these may make sense for today's systems, they were just too large for my Xen test domain.