[nycbug-talk] File Backed Disks- Speed Issues

[Charles Sprickman]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Isaac Levy wrote:

> On Sep 28, 2006, at 3:32 PM, Jonathan Vanasco wrote:
>
>> on a tangent...
>>
>> OSX has  a neat tool called iPartition
>> 	http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
>>
>> something like that, under freebsd, would probably solve your issues.
>
> Well, HECK YEAH, that actually would solve my problems.  Does anyone
> know if there's any historical attempt at flexible partition changes
> to a disk, and how successful it was?

When I added some drives to one of the boxes mentioned before, I went from 
250GB to 500GB.  With some bsdlabel fiddling and growfs I successfully 
grew a partition with data on it.

Drawbacks:

-you can only grow a partition
-you can only grow the last partition (plan ahead!) unless you want to 
dump/restore data on other partitions
-the feedback about the reliability of growfs on -hackers was a little 
scary
-it does not appear that anyone is currently working on it
-with UFS2 it does something that kills the dynamic inode allocation stuff

> This has to have been a problem people have tackled since the
> earliest disk drives... Right?

Do some of the Linux tools deal with BSD partitions?  I think gpartd(?) is 
some sort of PartitionMagic clone.

Charles

> Rocket-
> .ike
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> % NYC*BUG talk mailing list
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> %Be sure to check out our Jobs and NYCBUG-announce lists
> %We meet the first Wednesday of the month
>