Summary: Growing UFS file systems

From: Bart Terryn (bart@grafikon.com)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 12:16:43 EDT


First thanks to all the good people who took the time to answer me.

And here are the results and conclusions of the jury:
(distilled from answers from at least 6 different sources)

1. No, you do not need Volume Manager to grow an UFS filesystem
2. Yes, you can grow a normal UFS file system by using either:
/usr/lib/fs/ufs/mkfs -G -M /current/mount /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZsA newsize
or
/usr/opt/SUNWmd/sbin/growfs -M /mnt /dev/rdsk/c1t4d0s0

3. The latter command is part of the Volume Manager package. But you do not
need a full installation to use the growfs command.

4. Several people gave the good advice to grow busy file systems in small
chunks

5. Some people warned that using the command might crash, lockup the system
(probably on 'busy filesystems')

6. My personal advise:
- go ahead and grow your filesystem online
- do not try it without a backup
- prefer to do it on a quiet (single-user mode) system.

PS: just in case you would be interested, soft partitions of Volume Manager
do not take away much of the performance.

PPS: the jury is still out on the question why this 'important' feature is
unmarketed and even undocumented (the mkfs option -G does not exist
according to SUN man pages)

Anyhow thanks again,

Bart
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