A major reason for that space is liquidity, for lack of a better phrase. If
you have 5% reserved you can probably allocate a new block near your
existing file. If you only have, say, 1%, you will probably have a lot more
thrashing.
However this all assumes the same file size distribution as in the
Hello,
When Ubuntu installers create disk partitions, they reserve the default
5% of blocks for root-only use. For nowadays hard disks, however, that
percentage can make dozens of gigabytes, which seems much more than the
necessary/reasonable amount for that purpose.
People can change the re
