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 _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
