default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Jacob Yundt]

>
>> People do shrink volumes, and this lack of flexibility is an important
>> consideration I feel was ignored in the Server WG decision.
>
> What is the use case for volume shrinking in a server context? Dual boot is a total edge case for servers.

I shrink ext4 filesystems on servers pretty frequently. Most recently because:

*) Received bad information from an end user which required changing
several LVs/FSs.
*) An "oops" situation where a filesystem was incorrectly increased by
an extra order of magnitude
*) Unexpected (e.g. emergency) growth of an application which required
increasing a filesystem and shrinking another (lesser) used
filesystem.

Yes in all three aforementioned cases we had to unmount the ext4
filesystem in order to shrink it, however, we would _not_ have been
able to do this with xfs.

On a semi related note: I grow/shrink JFS2 filesystems (on AIX) all
the time. It would be great if ext4 had online shrink.

-Jacob