I don’t see any conflict in those. The second one clearly states that the disk will need to be mounted after conversion - which implies that it couldn’t be mounted already! While there are other means of operating that allow this to happen, the easiest (most guaranteed effective) method would be boot a live medium so the drive being worked on would not be mounted.
Does that help?
What I read in the second link apropos mounting is this:
The converter creates a sparse file to hold all of the references to the original ext3 filesystem, and the offsets in this file correspond to offsets on the block device. This allows the admin to mount the image file via readonly loopback and see the original ext3 filesystem and the converted Btrfs filesystem at the same time.
It just refers to the imagefile from the filesystem before convesion saved in a subvolume.
But then in the exaple usage:
Mount the resulting Btrfs filesystem
mount -t btrfs /dev/xxx /btrfs
I don’t get what “in place” means in this context
I think what ArchWiki’s about conversion of a filesystem with an operating system installed on it.
Open a new thread about it here so we can stop hijacking this one.
The partition can’t be mounted during the conversion. So if it is root partition, you will need to boot off of something else to convert it.
“in place” doesn’t mean “while running”. It means it converts the existing partition.
Thanks for clarifying that!