Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 01:48:50PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
  

quoted

There still is - at least for ext[23].  Even offline resizers
can't do resizes from any to any size, extfs developers recommend
to recreate filesystem anyway if size changes significantly.
I'm too lazy to find a reference now, it has been mentioned here
on linux-raid at least this year.  It's sorta like fat (yea, that
ms-dog filesystem) - when you resize it from, say, 501Mb to 999Mb,
everything is ok, but if you want to go from 501Mb to 1Gb+1, you
have to recreate almost all data structures because sizes of
all internal fields changes - and here it's much safer to just
re-create it from scratch than trying to modify it in place.
Sure it's much better for extfs, but the point is still the same.
    

I'll just mention that I once resized a multi-Tera ext3 filesystem and 
it took 8hours +, a comparable XFS online resize lasted all of 10 
seconds! 

Because of the different way these file systems do things, there is no 
comparable resize, at least in terms of work to be done. For many 
systems R/W operations are more common than resize, so the F/S type is 
selected to optimize that. ;-)

-- 
bill davidsen [off-list ref]
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979