* What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)?
@ 2026-02-09 16:14 techlord8
2026-02-10 9:05 ` Carlos Maiolino
2026-02-10 15:47 ` Christoph Hellwig
0 siblings, 2 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: techlord8 @ 2026-02-09 16:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: linux-xfs
It seems this has never been asked before, at least I wasn't able to find anything about it on the wiki (xfs.org) and the mail archives, nor on web search.
While the wiki has a detailed article about what complicates shrinking support ( https://xfs.org/index.php/Shrinking_Support ), I was hoping to find something like this about offline growing but couldn't.
From the manual: "The filesystem must be mounted to be grown".
Common sense tells me offline growing should be simpler given that there is no interference from data being read and written at the same time. So why can XFS not be grown offline?
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* Re: What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)?
2026-02-09 16:14 What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)? techlord8
@ 2026-02-10 9:05 ` Carlos Maiolino
2026-02-10 15:47 ` Christoph Hellwig
1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Carlos Maiolino @ 2026-02-10 9:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: techlord8; +Cc: linux-xfs
On Mon, Feb 09, 2026 at 04:14:03PM +0000, techlord8@web.de wrote:
> It seems this has never been asked before, at least I wasn't able to find anything about it on the wiki (xfs.org) and the mail archives, nor on web search.
>
> While the wiki has a detailed article about what complicates shrinking support ( https://xfs.org/index.php/Shrinking_Support ), I was hoping to find something like this about offline growing but couldn't.
>
> From the manual: "The filesystem must be mounted to be grown".
>
> Common sense tells me offline growing should be simpler given that there is no interference from data being read and written at the same time. So why can XFS not be grown offline?
>
Without digging into 30 years of history... XFS has been designed to run
on high-end hardware where downtime was virtually unacceptable, so, no
need to spend engineering hours writing a feature that is not required.
Also, this would mostly require the growfs code to be duplicated between
the kernel and xfsprogs, adding maintenance burden and unnecessary
complexity.
Those are my assumptions though, but I didn't dig into any design
documents to come up with them, so take it with a grain of salt.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* Re: What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)?
2026-02-09 16:14 What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)? techlord8
2026-02-10 9:05 ` Carlos Maiolino
@ 2026-02-10 15:47 ` Christoph Hellwig
1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Christoph Hellwig @ 2026-02-10 15:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: techlord8; +Cc: linux-xfs
On Mon, Feb 09, 2026 at 04:14:03PM +0000, techlord8@web.de wrote:
> Common sense tells me offline growing should be simpler given that
> there is no interference from data being read and written at the same
> time. So why can XFS not be grown offline?
Short answer: because no one implemented it.
Long answer: because to grow a file system safely you want a transaction
mechanism, and XFS only has that in the kernel. Growing a live file
system also really isn't hard in any significant way (unlike shrinking).
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2026-02-10 15:47 UTC | newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2026-02-09 16:14 What prevents XFS from being grown offline (without being mounted)? techlord8
2026-02-10 9:05 ` Carlos Maiolino
2026-02-10 15:47 ` Christoph Hellwig
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).