[ext2resize] Re: [Ext2-devel] current status of online resizing

[Theodore Ts'o <ty...@mi...>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 12:14:21PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> > In particular, although it's been a while and so I can't remember all
> > of the details, but IIRC, the tools which moves blocks around to make
> > room for the resize inode scared me a little, and would require a
> > bunch of rework before I would be comfortable with it.  Integrating it
> > is in my todo list, but for now, at least Red Hat/Fedora deals with
> > this by including both the source packages in their SRPM, and building
> > pieces of both.
> 
> Oh, I thought ext2online (which is mostly just an ioctl driver for the
> kernel resizing) was part of e2fsprogs.  Was that only in the RH/FC
> e2fsprogs 1.36 release?

I think so, yes; it came out of the ext2resize source tree.

> Maybe you are thinking of ext2prepare?  It would probably be as good
> or better to use the resize2fs itable moving and then the e2fsck code
> for recreating the resize inode.  That would avoid the addition of
> a whole bunch of duplicate code to e2fsprogs.

Yup, that's what I'm thinking about.  My plan was to use the resize2fs
itable moving code, combined with a user-space journaling scheme
implemented layered on top of unix_io to protect the filesystem in
case of a system crash.

We need this in order to implement inode resizing for people who wants
to use a larger inode size without doing a dump/restore, anyway....

						- Ted