On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 9:25 AM, Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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? I've used it several times in the last year, usually to re-arrange storage so that a cache is on a separate filesystem and less likely to screw up the whole working environment. > 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. Locality is *much* less critical with modern flash drives. > 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? Yes, they would. So what? While it's common to stop a filesystem, backup a directory, and re-assign a new partition mounted locally to restore the data to, this can be a *very* painful operation. > And if you have a backup, you're halfway to mkfs & restore, which will > leave you in a much better place. In theory, yes, which is why I personally prefer to use such tools. But doing this to "/" when someone has used default partitioning and you need to clean it up later with minimal downtime is very expensive in manpower. > 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 _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
