Re: resizer?

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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Alex Zarochentsev wrote:
> hello,
> 
> On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 10:55:12PM -0500, David Masover wrote:
> 
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>>What happened to resizefs.reiser4?  I know repacking/shrinking is
>>gone/proprietary, but what about growing?  I distinctly remember that I
>>used to be able to grow a Reiser4 partition.
> 
> 
> i guess it was reiserfs.

No.  It was Reiser4.  I remember because I booted with a normal install
CD, created partitions:

hda1	/boot		ext3
hda5	(no mount)	unformatted
hda6	/		reiserfs
hda7	swap		swap

After installing a Reiser4-enabled Gentoo Linux (and the reiser4progs)
on hda6, I booted hda6, formatted hda5 to reiser4 and copied hda6 to it.

After all that, I was able to boot a boot CD, copy the reiser4progs off
of hda6 to a tempfs (RAM), deleted hda6, resized hda5 to fill the disk,
and was able to use the reiser4 resizer to expand the filesystem on hda5.

I experimented, trying to shrink the FS back down, and it told me that
shrinking wasn't implemented.  But growing the FS?  That was in there
ever since my first download of reiser4progs, and it really seems like a
tiny job.

>>How much work would you expect a repacker to be?  (I might try writing a
>>proof-of-concept on my own...)
> 
> 
> no idea,  new version should be "smarter" then the old one, 
> the algorithm is not scratched yet.

An offline repacker would still be great, or at least one that assumes
no processes touching the FS.  Dirty a bunch of blocks towards the end
of the FS, shrink the FS, and let the normal packer (re: not repacker)
decide where to put them.

This seems like a weekend job to me, but my weekends are full and I
don't have a working knowledge of the FS internals, meaning I'd have to
spend two or three weekends reading source code...

I'm willing to do that, but it will have to wait till summer.

I realize that this may not be quite the industrial-strength repacker
that you wanted, but it should be immediately useful, which is a lot
better than "We might do it if you pay us."
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