e4defrag
precisa que o sistema de arquivos seja montado porque solicita ao driver do sistema de arquivos do kernel que execute a desfragmentação, mas não faz isso sozinho.
Quanto à desfragmentação de espaço livre e à desfragmentação de arquivos relevante, as correções nunca foram concluídas; a última menção na lista de discussão relevante data de 2014 :
The
e4defrag
is ine2fsprogs
, and the code is still getting maintained and improved. Dmitry Monakhov has in particular added a lot of “torture tests”, and found a number of race conditions in the underlying kernel code. He recently also sent a code refactor of the kernel code which significantly improved it and (shrank the size of ext4 by 550 lines of code).That being said, there hasn't been any real feature development for
e4defrag
in quite some time. There has been some discussion about what the kernel APIs might be to support this feature, but there has never been a finalized API proposal, let alone an implementation.
Então, duvido que exista algo que valha a pena testar atualmente.