Re: libparted and ext2

[Andrew Clausen]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 11:35:28PM +0200, B.Hakvoort wrote:
> I have some questions about ext2 handling :
> 
> - Since libparted-1.6.12 the size of a new partition is no longer
> absolute. e.g. i create a partition of 50MB and it'll be 52 or 47 or..
> MB. It's not a very serious issue, but it can be anoying at times. Can
> someone shed some light on this?

There shouldn't be any difference in this respect between earlier
versions and 1.6.12.  Can you reproduce any difference?

libparted does cylinder alignment stuff if it can.  If you want to
force a particular size, then use ped_constraint_exact(), or use your
own custom constraint.

> - When i create a ext2 partition with fdisk and mke2fs, libparted can't
> resize it. It throws something like: "this filesystem has a rather
> strange layout, parted cannot resize this (yet)"
> Is this known behaviour? or is it just my machine behaving strange?

Known behaviour.  The current ext2 resizer is very old.  It should
replaced with e2fsprogs.  (Issues: e2fsprogs doesn't have a library
interface - it can only work on devices you feed it; error handling
would be painful)

> - when i resize an empty ext2 partition from a rather small size to a
> much bigger size, say from 1500 to 25000 MB, the "used space" (it's just
> created :S) grows *a lot*. Why is this?

How much?  I'd expect used space to grow a fair bit because of all
the metadata - inode tables, block/inode bitmaps, backup superblocks,
etc.


Cheers,
Andrew