OT: redhat

[Bill Vermillion]

Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets that will last an eternity, 
but on Sat, Nov 13 14:32 , Bill Campbell wrote:" 

> On Sat, Nov 13, 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
> >On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 11:42:50AM -0800, Bill Campbell wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, Nov 09, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
> >>
> >> >Confusious (Jay Ashworth) say:

> >> >> On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 09:43:13AM -0500, Bill Vermillion
> >> >> wrote:

> >> >> > Sure you can add pieces and expand a filesystem anytime
> >> >> > you want >if< you have the right OS. :-) :-) :-) AIX is
> >> >> > the only one that I know of that does that. :-(

> >> >> SuSE 9, XFS.

> >> >Filesystem is not the question. PHYSICAL PARTITION (as
> >> >in...think fdisk, folks) is the issue. I'm talking about
> >> >needing to join two disparately located partitions into one
> >> >partition and expanding the fs that's on one of them to
> >> >include the space on another.

> >> The Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) or FreeBSD vinum
> >> provides this capability. There's an interesting feature in
> >> thsi month's Linux Journal on the unionfs which provides
> >> some very interesting capabilities joining multiple file
> >> systems types including file system snapshots, software
> >> versioning, and others which I'm not sure I understand yet.

> >Forgive me; of course this is a two parter.

> >LVM lets you add more physical partitions on to a logical one;
> >XFS lets you enlarge an active filesystem to take advantage of
> >the new space.

> On Linux systems, you have programs that will resize existing
> partitions, /sbin/resize2fs, and /sbin/resize_reiserfs on a
> SuSE 9.0 Professional box here which handle ext2/3 and reiser
> file systems. FreeBSD has a program, growfs, to handle the job.

I'm not familiar with the SuSE offerings but growfs will only
let you grow a file system.

The big confusion in the BSD world vs the rest of the world
is the definition of partitions.  In BSD those are slices.
And if you want to use growfs beyond the boundary of a slice
[called a partition in the rest of the world] you have to
resize the slice with fdisk, and then once slice is larger
you can enlarge the system with growfs.

If you look back at the attributuions I mentioned AIX was the only
one I knew of that could expand dynamically. growfs requires an
unmounted fs, and while not an AIX expert [or as that AIXpert?]
I understood that it's facility would expand on a running system.

Then Jay mentioned SuSE 9 XFS.

Then Mark [aka Fairlite] mentioned joining two physically disparate
partitions to be able to make a larger FS.   I can see that will
be problematic at least in the Intel based world as everything 
expects 4 physical partitions, one of which will be active.

Each partition must occupy contiguous disk space.  So to
use space on more than one partition [BSD slice] that are not
physically adjacent the fileysystem creation programs would handle
that at the logical level.  I don't see the need for having to
physically join partitions to make a file system if you can
logically create a filesystem spread over more than one
physical partition.

I think at least part of this discussion is taling about FS and
other parts about physical useage.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com