From owner-freebsd-current Sun Mar 18 14:32:43 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 13A4137B718 for ; Sun, 18 Mar 2001 14:32:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from iedowse@maths.tcd.ie) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 18 Mar 2001 22:32:40 +0000 (GMT) To: Andrea Campi Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav , Thomas , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: growfs In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 18 Mar 2001 23:08:04 +0100." <20010318230804.A4160@webcom.it> Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 22:32:40 +0000 From: Ian Dowse Message-ID: <200103182232.aa63999@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <20010318230804.A4160@webcom.it>, Andrea Campi writes: > >Anyway, that was not my point. If I reboot into single-user, and am thus sure >to have the / fs in a clean, consistent state, should I expect growfs to work >in a safe way? If so, we should document it. I think it is still unlikely to be completely safe. The kernel may panic if it finds inconsistencies in the filesystem, and I'm sure that growfs (temporarily) introduces some very serious inconsistencies while it is running. Also, when growfs completes, the kernel's idea of the filesystem is quite different from the parameters actually set on the disk. If the kernel was to panic half-way through a growfs operation, or if growfs died, say because the kernel failed to fault in some pages from the growfs executable, you could end up with a very confused filesystem! Ian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message