Re: Resizing ext3

[Greg Roelofs]

Andrew Clausen wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 02:44:29PM -0700, Anand Panangadan wrote:
>
>> Can parted resize ext3 partitions (assuming that I am
>> not changing the START position)? When I try to do
>> this on an unmounted ext3 partition on Redhat 9
>> (parted 1.6.3), I get "No implementation: this ext2
>> filesystem has a rather strange layout!". But the GNU
>> parted webpage indicates that ext3 resizing is
>> possible.

> This is not an ext3-related problem.  It's probably due to some
> raid stride option, which Parted can't cope with.  See the
> mke2fs manpage... look for the -R option.

On the contrary, it _is_ an ext3-related problem.  As I believe I reported
in the "1.6.4, 1.6.5: Filesystem has incompatible feature enabled" thread
last month,[1] a standard 1.32 ext3 file system with dir_index turned off
triggers precisely this error.  Specifically:

        mke2fs-1.32 -c -j /dev/hda8
        tune2fs-1.32 -O ^dir_index /dev/hda8
        e2fsck-1.32 -fD /dev/hda8
        [boot parted]
        [resize hda8 about 3 MB smaller]
           No Implementation: This ext2 filesystem has a rather strange
           layout!  Parted can't resize this (yet).

Now, whether mke2fs -j internally triggers -R I leave to you folks;
the point is that -j == ext3, and there is no support in Parted 1.6.5
for doing much of anything with ext3 partitions created by newer versions
of e2fsprogs.  That includes a simple partition move into a larger and
contiguous empty space, something that should be trivial for Parted to
manage (given that it knows everything about the existing partition's
layout and size, and a byte-for-byte copy of the data into an identical
partition freshly created by itself as part of the "move" command should
not require any knowledge whatsoever of the internal filesystem).  The
only way I could imagine the trivial case _not_ working is if the file-
system somehow requires knowledge of its physical location on disk, but
that seems fairly ridiculous, at least to someone who's never messed
with low-level Linux filesystem and disk-partition code...

[1] http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2003-05/msg00048.html

-- 
Greg Roelofs            address@hidden             http://pobox.com/~newt/
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