Ext4 on Support Tools

Complete Linux Filesystem and Partition Management Guide: Advanced Storage Administration for Enterprise Environments

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0500

Linux filesystem and partition management represents a critical skillset for systems administrators managing enterprise storage infrastructure. This comprehensive guide covers traditional and modern storage technologies, advanced resizing techniques, enterprise-grade management practices, and automated solutions for production environments.

Linux Filesystem Internals and Optimization: From VFS to Advanced Storage Techniques

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0500

Linux filesystem architecture represents one of the most sophisticated storage management systems in computing. Understanding the Virtual File System (VFS) layer, filesystem internals, and advanced optimization techniques is crucial for building high-performance storage systems. This guide explores filesystem architecture, performance tuning, and advanced storage configurations.

Resize a Root ext4 Partition Online Without Reboot

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 14:05:00 -0500

The following is a guide to resizing your root ext4 file system online. After the operation, your partition will have more free space. There will be no shrinkage of the root file system. The root partition could have been any partition, not exactly the root one, but in most cases, such operations on the root are more complex and dangerous, so ALWAYS back up (or snapshot the VM) before performing such operations!

During the resize operation, none of the services need to be shut down, rebooted, or unmounted.

Even so, we rebooted the server once as a precaution, since it was possible and the server was not in production. Rebooting the server after this kind of resizing is not necessary. The method was tested on Ubuntu 22.04 with kernel 5.15 on a VMware virtual disk. Any distribution with a recent kernel, parted (or growpart) and e2fsprogs works the same way.

Summary:

Make the kernel see the larger disk (rescan the SCSI device).
Grow the partition with growpart (package cloud-guest-utils on Debian and Ubuntu, cloud-utils-growpart on RHEL) or with resizepart in parted.
Grow the file system using resize2fs from E2fsprogs. There is a version of this package included in most Linux distributions with the same name.