[ale] Online resize of EXT3 on plain partition

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/04/2010 03:53 PM, brian at polibyte.com wrote:
> This is just an academic question, but does anyone know if online growth
> of an ext3 filesystem that resides on a plain partition (i.e. not lvm or
> softwre raid) is possible?

Aye, it is.

> The problem I ran into (on RHEL5) is that after I expanded the partition
> to use the new space, the kernel didn't seem to re-read the partition
> table. resize2fs reported that the filesystem was already using all the
> available blocks. Running partprobe on the sevice did not make a
> difference. After rebooting, I was able to grow the filesystem.

That does tend to happen on a non-LVM partition, though that behavior is 
something I seem to encounter less these days.  I wonder if a newer 
kernel would fix it; I haven't run a terribly old kernel even on server 
systems in quite some time, though I expect after the few features that 
I am waiting on to become fully baked are done, I'll stick with a 
particular kernel long-term again.

I know that I used to encounter situations where running partprobe 
frequently failed to prompt the kernel to refresh its view of the layout 
of discs.  I can't remember exactly when the last time that was, however.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475