I’ve been taking a computer architecture class where we’ve done some MIPS development and while there’s an IDE available (MIPster) I’ve preferred to do most of the my development in vim. As most of you know Vim is Vi Improved, a text editor that allows you to do all of your editing through keyboard shortcuts and the command line.

I recently ran into an error while using Vim on my university shell account:

E667 Fsync Failed

It turns out that the error was caused by Vim’s inability to write to disk. I had a core dump that was using up most of my disk quota which prevented vim from allocating space to save the file. Once I deleted the dump, freeing up some space, I was good to go.