BFS Partition Resizer: Three-quarter-term Report

Blog post by ahenriksson on Mon, 2012-08-06 20:31

For this period, I have been working on getting resizing to work from within Haiku, rather than just in bfs_shell. In its current state, the code works, sometimes, if you don't stress it too much and write data to the partition while resizing. On the bright side, recovery from various errors is working well :). In terms of functionality, the only thing missing is the ability to grow full or almost full file system. The problem with this is that we need to grow the bitmap that tracks allocated blocks before we can actually make use of the new blocks. This can be overcome with a little slyness, but it's a bit of work, and adds some complexity.

I think it would be better to focus on getting the current code into a finished state. So my plan for the remaining time is to try to exterminate the remaining bugs, and polish the code. I'd also like to rebase my work into a neat patch set. The chances of finding time to add resize support to DriveSetup seem fairly slim at the moment. But since the task is independent of my other work, it might be something to start on if I run out of things to do in the last few days.

On a different note, I will be travelling away for two weeks at the end of the coding period (on the 18th), returning the September 2nd. Last time I went to an internet café my email account was hijacked, so I'll probably be accessing the internet sparingly. I hope this won't cause any trouble.