Ext3 users - Apr 2004 - online resize of ext3 possible?

Hi folks,

Is it possible to resize an ext3 filesystem while it's online?  It
looks like resize2fs won't do the trick unless the filesystem is
unmounted.  And ext2resize takes one look at the filesystem while it's
mounted and complains as well, this time about un-supported features.

It's not a huge deal if I have to shutdown the system to grow the two
filesystems, it's just more annoying.

I'm running Debian Unstable, with alot of /unstable and /testing
patches.  It's upto date as of last night too.  

Thanks,
John

Hi,

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 17:13, John Stoffel wrote:
> Is it possible to resize an ext3 filesystem while it's online?  
Yes and no.  Yes: you want the bits at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ for it.  But no, it's still
somewhat experimental --- the kernel bits seem robust for me but the
user-land tools still need a bit of work.  For online growth on ext2/3,
you need to prepare space on-disk for the filesystems group descriptor
tables to grow into.  The new format for that is only understood by a
patched mke2fs, so you can't "prepare" an existing filesystem for
online
growth just yet.  And e2fsck can't yet properly prepare errors in that
reserved space.

I've *just* done a release of the kernel patches against 2.6.6-rc1 and
the user-space patches against e2fsprogs-1.35, and you're welcome to try
those out.
> It
> looks like resize2fs won't do the trick unless the filesystem is
> unmounted.  
Correct, resize2fs is offline-only.
> And ext2resize takes one look at the filesystem while it's
> mounted and complains as well, this time about un-supported features.
The current one in CVS works for me --- I've added recognition of
extended attributes to that.  A proper release of that is in progress.

Cheers,
 Stephen