[linux-lvm] extending a logical volume

[Andreas Dilger]

On Jan 21, 2002  19:09 +0100, Pierrick PONS wrote:
> I've read the extending logical volume section and I can't believe this.
> According to the doc, it would be impossible to extend a logical volume 
> without unmounting it first.

LV resize != fs resize.

> I'm using a ext3 (with a 2.4.17 kernel) filesystem and I'd like to extend my 
> logical volume without unmounting it first. This would be used on a
> production server, so I can't unmount any logical volume.

Currently, you cannot online resize ext3, but that is only because the code
which I wrote to do this for 2.2 was never released, and it has not been
ported to 2.4/2.5 yet.

> I've seen that a ext2online patch does exist, maybe this fonctionnality is 
> still implemented in a newer kernel ?

No, still only available as a patch.  The ext2 online resizing patch is
very solid.  The ext3 code is, by necessity, a total rewrite of the code
to work with ext3 journaling, but the fundamental concepts are the same.

> Could you give me, if it exists, a method to extend the size without unmount 
> the logical volume ?

Use ext2 + ext2online patch (not great, because you probably crash more
often than you need to resize), use ext3 but no online resizing (offline
resizing works just fine with ext2resize), or work on porting the ext3
resizing code to 2.4.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/