Re: File System conversion -- ideas

Jamie Lokier
2003-06-29T13:13:57Z

John Bradford wrote:
I think
> the performance of an on-the-fly filesystem conversion utility is
> going to be so much worse than just creating a new partition and
> copying the data across,

which is awfully difficult if you have, say, a 60GB filesystem, a 60GB
disk, and nothing else.

> that the only reason to do it would be if you
> could do it on a read-write filesystem without unmounting it.

IMHO even if it requires the filesystem to be unmounted, it would
still be useful. More challenging to use - you'd have to boot and run
from ramdisk, but much more useful than not being able to convert at all.

> What I'd like to see is union mounts which allowed you to mount a new
> filesystem of a different type over the original one, and have all new
> writes go to the new fileystem. I.E. as files were modified, they
> would be re-written to the new FS. That would be one way of avoiding
> the performance hit on a busy server.

But useless unless you have a second disk lying around that you don't
use for anything but filesystem conversions.

-- Jamie