[Mageia-dev] time to switch from raw partitions to lvm?

Buchan Milne bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net
Mon Feb 21 21:48:56 CET 2011


On Monday, 21 February 2011 14:19:23 Michael Scherer wrote:
> Le lundi 21 février 2011 à 10:56 +0100, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
> > Another part of the discussion may be the fact that a large number of
> > users are running dual (or multiple) boot systems, keeping the
> > pre-installed Windows and adding Linux. Others will have Windows and
> > Mandriva, adding Mageia.
> > 
> > While LVM may be nice if you are running one OS on one harddisk, it
> > may be not so easy when running 3 OS on one harddisk. Or different
> > installations of the same Linux (like stable version and cauldron).

IMHO, it is *easier* to run multiple distributions on one machine with LVM, as 
you don't have the problem of having to statically pre-assign partitions to 
different distributions, and then have to image one filesystem to enlarge the 
filesystem before it, shrink the one after it, and put it back ...

The only complication is where to put bootloaders, multiple distros sharing 
/boot is not great, so I just make a few small boot partitions before my PVs.

> I do run lvm on Fedora and mac os x without any trouble. Windows

out-the-box

> will
> not support any linux file system more than lvm,

There are third-party drivers/software for accessing ext2/ext3 partitions 
under Windows, even LUKS+ext2/ext3. But, on LVM, I don't think there are any 
options.

> and the same goes for
> os x.

I thought Mac OS X had ext2/ext3 read support?

> For a linux system, a lvm logical volume is just another disk.

That's a bit of an over-simplification. Hot-plugged LVM systems (I have a 
2*2TB external disk enclosure, running in "SAFE50" mode, AKA half RAID0, half 
RAID1, RAID1 is a PV in a separate VG) don't auto-mount like hot-plugged non-
LVM disks, rescue still have problems activating VGs until recently (may still 
be present), kernel upgrades may still mess up root= parameter on LVM etc. 
etc.

I have been using LVM with online resizing in diskdrake since about Mandrake 
8.2 (with XFS), and I think for users without non-Linux installations, it 
should be made more prominent or the default ... but only when all the 
remaining issues are addressed.

Regards,
Buchan


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