Comments on: How to upgrade to ext4 in place

By: Jordan Hall (divineomega) 's status on Friday, 10-Jul-09 13:15:23 UTC - Identi.ca

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:11:40 +0000

[...] @colindean Try this: http://www.kev009.com/wp/2008/12/how-to-upgrade-to-ext4-in-place/ [...]

By: petch

petch — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:48:57 +0000

I can’t wait ext4 developers from reinventing xfs !

By: Phil Dufault

Phil Dufault — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:59:18 +0000

WARNING: DON’T CONVERT YOUR /boot PARTITION. Right now, there is no stable version of grub with ext3 support. Even if there was, it really won’t gain you anything :-) .

Err, you mean ext4. :)

By: Tobias

Tobias — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:20:57 +0000

Hi we build an ex4 gentoo liveCD. The CD is available under http://www.gentoolivecd.piffpaffpuff.net/

Have Fun

By: ext4 and the kernel modules | Jitu

ext4 and the kernel modules | Jitu — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:08:48 +0000

[...] to upgrade from ext3 to ext4 without the need for reformatting such as the one on Kernelnewbies and Kev009.com. However the partition of which you want to upgrade the file system must be unmount which is some [...]

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:20:43 +0000

Just some really initial figures with root and home fully ext4, and this is all I can probably compare since I rushed along and didn’t test any other apps…

From hitting Enter at the grub prompt till I could login dropped from 45 seconds to 40. From login to “Fully loaded*” XFCE dropped from 45 seconds to 25 seconds. Total boot till login time is now 65 seconds compared to 90 before.

*Fully loaded implies all my autostart stuff completed and the desktop is idle.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:08:32 +0000

I left the inodes alone since they were already at 256 as you had mentioned. I tried the conversion on my USB can and got the same error there. Between disabling huge_file and making darn sure I had LSF support I got the can to work and I’m doing an rsync to it now. Whenever that’s finished I’ll tackle home, root, then maybe getting the newest pam_mount to play nice with my encryption.

I’m anxious for this to finish. I’m hoping if nothing else this will increase my drive performance a bit. A lot of what I do seems to stall around the hdd and with a 7200 RPM drive I’ve seen some improvement but not as much as I had hoped. But hey, this is a year old laptop so what can I expect :) I’ve timed a few of my common operations under ext3. I’d be glad to post some totally unscientific stats if you are interested.

By: kev009

kev009 — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:20:50 +0000

Be careful with the -I inode adjustment, I think it is getting some renovations right now so its best to do that as ext3. Probably better to chunk off the upgrades anyways, i.e do inodes, then extents, then the rest. FWIW your drive will appear corrupt a couple of times as fsck regenerates stuff, so it can look a little bit scary. I thought I hosed mine the first time around. But bottom line, if you don’t have backups and aren’t good with a LiveCD, stay away for now :-).

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:45:18 +0000

Excellent Instructions. I definitely recommend the backup. Had quite the scare today with my complicated Gentoo setup and still don’t have a successful conversion (cryptsetup home and pam mounted). I had to use debugfs to back off of the new ext4 features and use fsck to fix those “features” so that I could remount ext3.

I wouldn’t have lost much more than time and some pride had I lost my data but whatever I did different means these instructions aren’t foolproof. I either had segfault or CONFIG_LFS errors trying to mount the new ext4. I recompiled and installed the kernel with CONFIG_LFS with no improvement.

I may give this another try after I have a real backup. :)

-= Yet another Kevin running Gentoo =-