Re: File System conversion -- ideas

Matt Reuther
2003-07-01T15:50:19Z

It seems like the loopback device would be useful for this. You can move all
of you stuff into a mounted loopback device with the new fs. Is there not
some utility to take a filesystem image from inside an fs, and overwrite
that fs with it. It would be lots of sector-to-sector shuffling, but it
would be cleaner than trying to convert.

I guess you could try overlaying the old and new filesystems by virtualizing
the inodes, superblocks, directories, and other stuff in RAM, but you still
have to write it to disk, and some of the metadata from one fs will collide
with the other one. The superblock for ext2fs needs to written to several
fixed places on the filesystem, which might also be needed by
reiserfs/xfs/whatever.

Matt

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