Re: File System conversion -- ideas

[John Bradford]

> > > > that the only reason to do it would be if you
> > > > could do it on a read-write filesystem without unmounting it.
> > >
> > > IMHO even if it requires the filesystem to be unmounted, it would
> > > still be useful.  More challenging to use - you'd have to boot and run
> > > from ramdisk, but much more useful than not being able to convert at all.
> > 
> > Only if it is the root filesystem, the filesystem of which generally
> > isn't going to affect overall performance that much.
>
> ...now use a single "/" filesystem on most systems, with a tiny
> "/boot" one to ensure booting.  With journalling, this risk of losing
> data this way is much lower than it used to be, and the old reason for
> using multiple partitions - to avoid having to fsck /usr - no longer applies.

Well, I prefer to have separate patitions to reduce fragmentation and
increase flexibility, but I can see there are reasons for having a
single root filesystem.

> > > But useless unless you have a second disk lying around that you don't
> > > use for anything but filesystem conversions.
> > 
> > Not at all.  You can just use unpartitioned space on your existing
> > disk.
>
> So you have as much space unpartitioned on your disks as you are
> actually using to store data?  I generally don't.

I probably average about 20% of the disk partitioned in my single disk
desktop boxes.

John.