XFS With Linux 6.12 Adds New Ioctls To Exchange Contents Of Two Files

[intelfx]

In the 30+ years of using computers, I never once wanted or needed to shrink a volume. Now increasing a volume, that is another story because the volume of data never decreases. So other than playing around on a dev machine, when would you need to decrease the size of a volume?

In many various situations. Not that people who assume that any use-cases beyond their own do not exist are expected to understand.

[dekernel]

In many various situations. Not that people who assume that any use-cases beyond their own do not exist are expected to understand.

And if you notice, I simply asked for a use-case in simple, direct and no-accusatory manor which several people provided in the same manor. Sheesh.

[intelfx]

You have backups, right? Mount read-only, do last backup, delete, restore from backup.

All the home-use or SMB cases discussed here can easily be solved via backups, except it takes some time. But we're talking home or SMB, not 99.999% uptime, so meh. XFS still brings way more to the table than loses from not being able to shrink.

Not just time. It also takes double the amount of space (which you are unlikely to have on hand if you are not an enterprise that can buy disks by the rackfuls), plus the filesystem is unusable during this operatoin.

[intelfx]

And if you notice, I simply asked for a use-case in simple, direct and no-accusatory manor

No, you didn't. You insinuated that anyone who needs this is "playing around on a dev machine".

[toves]

A bit cool
Also some platforms such as Unix have a read_at and a write_at function where you can specify the offset to read from or write to but other platforms such as Windows don't have these functions so then you have to use fseek() instead before then call the read or write function, so it can be tricky to write portable code.

I understand WriteFile()/ReadFile() can do this with descriptors opened (CreateFile() ) with the FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED by specifying the offset in the (optional) OVERLAPPED structure passed as the terminal argument.

[dekernel]

No, you didn't. You insinuated that anyone who needs this is "playing around on a dev machine".

I did not imply anything, but you sure as heck inferred WAY TOO MUCH.

[intelfx]

I did not imply anything, but you sure as heck inferred WAY TOO MUCH.

I don’t need any justifications. I’m merely telling you that the manner in which you said your comment is very far from “no-accusatory”, or respectful, or impartial, or anything like that. Take it or leave it, I don’t care.

[waxhead]

In the 30+ years of using computers, I never once wanted or needed to shrink a volume. Now increasing a volume, that is another story because the volume of data never decreases. So other than playing around on a dev machine, when would you need to decrease the size of a volume?

Example: you have a large pool of disks in lvm with a 3TB XFS on top. You want to copy half of that volume to a NFS server elsewhere. Now you want to free up some disks since you have 1.5TB free on your XFS and use those disks for something else like EXT4/BTRFS/whatever...

[WileEPyote]

In the 30+ years of using computers, I never once wanted or needed to shrink a volume. Now increasing a volume, that is another story because the volume of data never decreases. So other than playing around on a dev machine, when would you need to decrease the size of a volume?

When I need to expand a partition on a fully partitioned disk. Gotta make the space somewhere. Most recently I wanted to expand my home partition because I used more than I expected after I started dabbling in AI. I wanted to shrink root to make more space for home. Not being able to shrink root meant I had to go with slower storage instead of reworking the setup on the nvme I wanted to use.

[dekernel]

I don’t need any justifications. I’m merely telling you that the manner in which you said your comment is very far from “no-accusatory”, or respectful, or impartial, or anything like that. Take it or leave it, I don’t care.

Well, since you are the one making accusatory statements about me so then yes, you do need to have justification for there to be any merit. If you don't care as you claim, they why are you continuously claiming I meant something when I, the original author, say I meant nothing by it?