Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3666 mails)

[Danny Sauer <suse-linux-e.suselists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 17 March 2005 11:23 am, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
> Ciro Iriarte wrote:
> > Anybody tried resizing an "in use" filesystem?, any procedures to
> > share?. It would be interesting to know about xfs/reiserfs/ext3
> > approachs. (no lvm)
>
> Jumping in here....
>
> When resizing partitions must the partitions be UN mounted or is it
> possible to resize an active fs ie /var without having a data backup?

If you can grow the partition (ie, you have room to extend the partition), 
then you can grow a ReiserFS filesystem online.  I regularly do it, though 
I use LVM (actually EVMS, but it's using LVM underneath).  Generally, I 
make a small root partition then make the rest of the disk an LVM PV, 
partitioned into /var, /usr, /home, etc.  Those partitions get initially 
created at a reasonable small size (like, around a gig or so), and I grow 
them as needed.  I've found that to work very well on my home systems - 
I've even grown filesystems using LVM and Reiser) during video capture to 
the filesystem being grown, it works quite well.

AFAIK, you can't shrink any of the filesystems online.  That makes sense, as 
a program might be trying to write to a block just before the resize 
operation, but not complete the write until after.  So you have to unmount 
to shrink.  Reiser and, IIRC, XFS can grow online - the others (including 
ext2/3) need unmounted to grow or shrink.

--Danny, wondering how he ever got along before LVM :)