Online resizing support for ext3 in RHEL 4

[Ed Wilts]

RHEL questions should be posted to the distribution-specific lists, not
redhat-list.  You'll get far better reponses that way since the Red Hat
engineers hang out there more than here.

taroon-list:    RHEL 3
nahant-list:    RHEL 4

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 09:20:00AM -0500, Justin Conover wrote:
> QUOTE
> "Alex asked:
> 
> I've got some AIX/HP-UX/Solaris sysadmins around my office that
> complain that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform is weak because it
> does not support the resizing of mounted filesystems. 

You know, Solaris doesn't really support online resizing either.  You
can extend a logical volume, you but you sure as heck can't extend the
size of a given partition, at least in Solaris 9 (so says my Solaris
admin).

> I did some basic google searching and it appears they're correct, to
> expand an ext3 filesystem you have to unmount it. Is support for
> online resizing going to be added to ext3 soon? Will Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux ever support it?  To which Shadowman replies:
> 
> Online resizing support for ext3 hit the mainline kernel in 2.6.10
> last November or thereabouts. The tools to take advantage of this
> support are in e2fsprogs 1.36.
> 
> None of this code is in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (kernel 2.6.9 and
> e2fsprogs 1.35), but all of it is in Fedora Core 4 (kernel 2.6.11 and
> e2fsprogs 1.37). Therefore, it's an exceedingly good bet that online
> resizing will be available, and very well baked, in Enterprise Linux
> 5. "
> 
> /QUOTE
> 
> Is shadowman wrong? I use a rhel 4 clone at home on a server and I
> know I use ext2online often.

According to the Red Hat documentation and the nahant mailing lists,
Shadowman is wrong.  Online expansion is in RHEL 4.  You can't reduce
the size of a volume online though.  You can do an rpm -q --changelog on
the kernel and e2fsprogs rpms.

I'd like to see you repost this to nahant-list.  It's tough to fathom
that shadowman could be wrong on this and I am most definitely NOT the
right person to contradict him.

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program