Re: I would like to propose that we turn on XFS Reflink in Fedora 29 by default

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On 5/2/18 7:15 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 5:36 AM Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> 
>> Neal Gompa <ngompa13@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
>>> And there's still the fun restriction of XFS not being able to shrink.
> 
>> But note that even ext4 can't shrink while being mounted.
> 
> But it can shrink when it's not. This is incredibly important for being
> able to deal with resizing both / and /home at the same time, or even
> trying to make space for multi-booting (typically with Windows but some
> people do other OSes too).

I've always seen the need for shrink as an indicator that someone had
poor planning along the way, or insufficient tools for provisioning to
start with.  Sure, there are exceptions, but in general who needs shrink
on a regular basis?

Shrink is actually pretty damaging to the filesystem; it takes all the
locality that the allocator tried to provide, and scatters it to the
wind.  The result is a stitched-together mess. 

Not only that, but wouldn't any sane administrator with important data
to take care of make a backup before an invasive action like shrink?

And if you have a backup, you're halfway to mkfs & restore, which will
leave you in a much better place.

So yes, you can shrink ext4, but it really should be seen as a last resort
IMHO.  I know it can be expedient at times, but I'm not sure people really
consider the downsides of the action.  On the surface, "yay it's smaller
now!" but a bit more investigation shows that it's a de-optimizing,
potentially dangerous administrative action.  Just my $0.02.

-Eric
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