memory usage of mke2fs et.al. ?

[Steven Scholz]

Hi all,

I noticed that the original mke2fs needs loads of RAM when formating big
partitions.

Ted Ts'o just confirmed:

"The dominant memory required by mke2fs is the block and inode bitmaps.
For a 60GB partition, the block bitmap alone is going to be around
2MB.  The inode bitmap size depends on what parameters you are giving
to mke2fs, but given the normal defaults it's probably another 1MB.
There will be a number of other write buffers, etc. but those are
probably the main ones...
e2fsck is always going to require far more memory, including up to 3
copies of the block bitmap and some 4 copies of the inode bitmap..."

We experienced "out of memory" when formating 60GB on an emdedded system
with on 16MB RAM.

Now I wonder if the busyboxed version of the "Ext2 FS Progs" have been
optimized in this respect?
Can someone make a statement on memory usage of mke2fs?

Thanks a million!

--
Steven