Online resize of a root ext4 file system

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 - ALWAYS back up 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. Using kernel 5.15, the following method was tested on Ubuntu 22.04. As a result, we can assume that if your system is newer than ours, you won’t have any problems.

Summary:

To resize a partition, use the resizepart command in the parted command. This package is available in most Linux distributions and has the same name as the needed command “parted”
Resize the file system using resize2fs from E2fsprogs. There is a version of this package included in most Linux distributions with the same name.

Resize on Support Tools

Online resize of a root ext4 file system