EXT3 Online Resize

[Al Gordon]

I've been playing around with LVM2 a little, and am impressed with how
easy it is to set up at install time with Ubuntu's installer.

My testbed is a laptop with only 18GB of disk.  For maximum
flexibility on such a small pool of storage, I want to be able to
resize my logical volumes (LV), including "/", without unmounting
them.  I tried XFS, which was really nice, up until the point that I
relized that I had to shrink an LV in order to make room for a new
one.  XFS doesn't shrink, apparently.  So, I switched back to EXT3,
which requires that you unmount the LV in order to resize it... unless
a specific kernel patch (ext3online) is installed.

So... is anyone aware of plans to provide this patch in Ubuntu?  I'm a
little wary of playing around with it myself, as I've only seen one
version of this patch that supports the 2.6 kernel, and that was for a
version of the kernel older than what Ubuntu provides, and is
apparently incomplete, according to what I read.

I'm also willing to try other filesystems.  My understanding is that
JFS doesn't shrink, and ReiserFS, I think, can grow while mounted, but
not shrink.

Comments, ideas, suggestions...?

Thanks,

-- 

  -- AL --