How to increase the size of a loop virtual disk?

Question

I have generated an image file with dd. The image contains two partitions.

I created a loop virtual disk: losetup -P /dev/loop0 $image_file. I mounted the two loop created partitions (loop0p1, loop0p2) to two mounting points.

My problem is the loop disk is too small for the files I want to add. I looked into the options of losetup, without avail.

Is there a way to increase the loop disk?

Answer 1

The usual warning: resizing file systems and partitions may cause data loss because of software bugs, faulty hardware, power loss, human errors. Make sure you always backup your data.

A loop device is a block device, logically analogous to a physical disk. As such, partition managers are not meant to directly resize it.

The couple of useful pieces you haven't found yet are losetup -c, to make the loop driver update the size of a block device when its backing file's size changes, and partprobe, to make the kernel update its internal representation of the partitions on a device. (Though you likely don't need to explicitly invoke the latter if you use a GUI partition manager such as GParted).

Let's set up a working example:

$ fallocate -l 100M volume
$ sudo parted <<'EOT'
select ./volume
mklabel msdos
mkpart primary ext4 1MiB 50M
mkpart primary ext4 50M 100%FREE
quit
EOT
$ sudo losetup -P /dev/loop0 volume
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/loop0p1
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/loop0p2
$ mkdir mp1 mp2
$ sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 mp1
$ sudo mount /dev/loop0p2 mp2

This gives:

$ lsblk /dev/loop0
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0       7:0    0  100M  0 loop
├─loop0p1 259:0    0   47M  0 part /path/to/mp1
└─loop0p2 259:1    0   52M  0 part /path/to/mp2
$ df -h /dev/loop0p*
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0p1     42M  1.1M   38M   3% /path/to/mp1
/dev/loop0p2     47M  1.1M   42M   3% /path/to/mp2

Then we can grow the file that backs our loop device and let losetup re-read the file's size to update the capacity of loop0:

$ fallocate -l 200M volume
$ sudo losetup -c /dev/loop0

Without unmounting the two partitions, we will only be able to grow them and the contained file systems by the amount of free space on their right (only /dev/loop0p2 can be extended in our case). Also, to be able to resize the file systems we need to make the kernel know about the changed partition table:

$ sudo parted <<'EOT'
select ./volume
resizepart 2 100%FREE
quit
EOT
$ sudo partprobe -s /dev/loop0
$ sudo resize2fs /dev/loop0p2

(Unmounting the two file systems will also allow you to shrink or move your partitions around. Note that, when shrinking a partition, the order of these steps is the other way round: first, resize the file system, then resize the partition (and tell the kernel about the changes if needed), then reduce the size of the backing file).

Finally obtaining:

$ lsblk /dev/loop0
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0       7:0    0  200M  0 loop
├─loop0p1 259:0    0   47M  0 part /path/to/mp1
└─loop0p2 259:1    0  152M  0 part /path/to/mp2
$ df -h /dev/loop0p*
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0p1     42M  1.1M   38M   3% /path/to/mp1
/dev/loop0p2    144M  1.6M  135M   2% /path/to/mp2

Answer 2

You cannot do that: the way the loopback device in the Linux kernel works it uses the image file size to operate on it and it won't write beyond it.

The only way to achieve what you want is to umount the image, increase its size/repartition it, run resize2fs or whatever FS you're using to resize partitions and then mount it back.