Comment 2 for bug 656115

Yes, this is a known restriction right now. Note that we reserve enough GDT blocks so you can grow the filesystem by a factor of 1024 of the initial size. So in practice the limitation is rather hard to hit except in rather extreme artificial test cases.

Yes, if you initially create a filesystem to be only a 1MB, and then grow it to be greater than 1GB, you'll lose. But that's not how most people should be using file system resizes.

If you *do* want to do this, for some kind of crazy installation system where you dd a CD-ROM image onto a disk and then resize it (which will result in really crappy filesystem layout) --- if you really want to do this crazy, insane, performance-destroying hack, you can manually control how many GDT blocks are reserved by using the resize extended parameter to mke2fs. See the mke2fs man page for more information.