Re: Volume Managers in Linux

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:53:58 -0500


From: smurf@noris.de (Matthias Urlichs)
Date: 4 Nov 1998 16:06:23 +0100

Evacuating a block in the middle of a file system ought to boil down to
shrinking the file system, copying the middle N chunks to the newly-freed
end chunks, and remapping the thing.

This may be somewhat inefficient, but file system shrinkage should be
fairly easy to do (CERTAINLY easier than allowing arbitrarily-big holes in
the middle).

Not only is it inefficient, but if the reason why you are evacuating a
block in the middle of the filesystem is because a disk is starting to
report errors, you may end up LOSING more data that you otherwise
would, since the filesystem shrinkage will end up copying data into the
failing disk.

- Ted

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