8.4. Enforcement (Limits)

There are two types of limits; Hard and Soft.

Soft limits are advisory.

Allow additional disk resources to be consumed for a period of time. this is known as the grace period.
Provide flexibility to users and processes that may occasionally need to exceed there quota temporarily

Hard Prevent further allocation of disk resources.

Any I/O that attempt to allocate further disk resources is failed.
Existing data on the disk is preserved and existing disk allocations can still be written.
Users must remove existing files to before new resources can be used.
Soft limits are be enforced as hard limits after the grace period.

Limits are never applied to the root user.