How to Create and Extend XFS file system based on LVM

In this post, we will show you how to create and extend xfs file system based on LVM.

XFS is a file system which is designed for high performance ,scalability and capacity point of view. It is generally used where large amount data to be stored / used on the File system. Some of the awesome freeze features of xfs are xfs_freeze, snapshot, xfs_unfreeze. One of the limitation of XFS is that we can not shrink or reduce this file system.

XFS is the default file system in the modern Linux distributions like RHEL 8/9, Fedora, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Ubuntu. We are assuming that a new disk (/dev/sdb) is already assigned to Linux system and we are going to perform below steps on that disk.

Without any further delay, let’s deep dive into the steps.

Step 1) Install LVM2 Package

To create LVM partitions on Linux, make sure lvm2 package is installed. In case, it is not installed then run following command,

$ sudo apt install -y lvm2     //Ubuntu & Debian System
# yum install lvm2 -y          // RHEL 7 & CentOS 7
or 
# dnf install lvm2 -y         // RHEL 9/8, Rocky Linux & AlmaLinux

Step 2) Create Partition using fdisk

In the below example, we have created 10GB partition on /dev/sdb using fdisk command and set “8e” as toggle id.

Step 3) Create LVM Components (pvcreate, vgcreate and lvcreate)

[root@linuxtechi ~]# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
 Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

[root@linuxtechi ~]# vgcreate vg_xfs /dev/sdb1
 Volume group "vg_xfs" successfully created
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

[root@linuxtechi ~]# lvcreate -L +6G -n xfs_db vg_xfs
 Logical volume "xfs_db" created
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Step 4) Format LVM Partition as XFS File System

Run the following mkfs.xfs command to format lvm,

[root@linuxtechi ~]# mkfs.xfs /dev/vg_xfs/xfs_db

Step 5) Mount the xfs file system

Create a directory named as xfs_test under /root and mount it using mount command. Run following set of commands,

For the permanent mounting , add the entry in /etc/fstab file.

Step 6) Extend the size of xfs file system

Check the whether free space is available in Volume group (vg_xfs) or not using below command :

[root@linuxtechi ~]# vgs vg_xfs 
 VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree
 vg_xfs 1 1 0 wz--n- 10.00g 4.00g
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

So, we will extend the file system by 3GB using lvextend command with “-r” option

[root@linuxtechi ~]# lvextend -L +3G /dev/vg_xfs/xfs_db -r

As we can see above that the size of “/dev/vg_xfs/xfs_db” has been extended from 6 GB to 9GB

Note : If xfs is not based on LVM , the use the xfs_growsfs command as shown below :

[root@linuxtechi ~]# xfs_growfs <Mount_Point> -D <Size>

The “-D size” option extend the file system to the specified size (expressed in file system blocks). Without the -D size option, xfs_growfs will extend the file system to the maximum size supported by the device.

Read Also : How to Setup Disk Quota on XFS File System in Linux Servers