This capability is provided by a kernel patch (2.2/2.3 and 2.0 versions
available - should apply cleanly to most versions as that part of the
kernel code hasn't changed much in a long time) and some user-space tools.
The amount that you can resize a filesystem depends on the block size and
whether or not you have "prepared" the filesystem for large resizes. The
ext2 filesystem is maintained as a normal filesystem at all times, and it
can be used by a non-patched kernel at any time, and with one exception
(if you have an old e2fsck) will fsck clean after a resize.
Note that you need some way to resize the underlying partition (via LVM
probably) in order to resize the filesystem. For testing purposes you
can also create a small filesystem on a large partition, and then resize
to fill the partition.
Patches are available at my web site:
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/online-ext2/
The user-space tools are now part of Lennert Buytenhek's ext2resize suite:
http://www.dsv.nl/~buytenh/ext2resize/
for which a patch is required from my site.
Please give it a good testing, as I haven't been able to find any problems
while putting a hundred copies of an 11MB filesystem tree into a filesystem
while doing thousands of resizes to the same mounted filesystem.
Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
\ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert
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