How To Extend Xfs Filesystem In Linux

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In the world of Linux, managing file systems is an essential task for any system administrator. XFS is a high-performance file system which was designed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. It is the default file system for RedHat Linux Enterprise version 7 onwards. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how to extend the XFS filesystem in Linux.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure that you have the xfsprogs package installed on your system. This package provides a set of commands to manage the XFS filesystem. If it’s not already installed, you can install it using the package manager for your distribution. For example, on Ubuntu, you could use the following command: 

  sudo apt-get install xfsprogs

Extending the XFS filesystem

To extend the XFS filesystem, you’ll first need to extend the underlying physical storage. This could be a logical volume, a partition, etc. Once this is done, you can use the xfs_growfs command to resize the filesystem.

Step 1 – Extend the underlying storage

First, let’s assume that your file system is on a Logical Volume managed by LVM. The logical volume is called lv_data and is in the volume group vg_data. You want to add 10GB of space to it. You can use lvextend command for this purpose: 

  lvextend -L +10G /dev/vg_data/lv_data

Step 2 – Resize the filesystem

After we have extended the logical volume, we can now resize the XFS filesystem using the xfs_growfs command. Here is the command you would run: 

  xfs_growfs /dev/vg_data/lv_data

This command will extend the XFS filesystem to use all available space on the logical volume. If you want to specify the size to increase to rather than using all available space, you can use the -D size option where size is the desired size of the filesystem in 512-byte blocks.

Conclusion

Managing disk space is a critical component of system administration, and the XFS file system provides a robust and scalable solution for Linux systems. By understanding how to extend the XFS filesystem, administrators can ensure that their systems continue to operate efficiently, even as storage requirements grow.