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

[Michael Scherer]

 On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:51:31 +0200, P. Christeas wrote:
> On Sunday 20 February 2011, Thierry Vignaud wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> What do you think about switching from defaulting to installing on 
>> raw
>> partitions to lvm
>> installing on LVs like fedora does ?
>
> I vote against that. (=to be enabled by default)
>
> LVM is fine for "enterprise" setups, or better, installations where 
> the
> (expert) admin will need to resize/move partitions in the future. 
> But, for
> simple machines/users, the complexity of having LVM is IMHO not worth 
> it.

 We often see people coming at the lug who have issue of having "not 
 enough
 space on their home", and who want to resize their partition. Of 
 course, they work around by using
 various adhoc system ( like mounting external disk and so on ), but I 
 think it would be much nicer
 for them to be able to resize it easily ( and not by using a livecd ).

> (remember also that on all *nix OSes, you can just add a partition,
> move some
> files like /usr/share/doc into it and then mount it on 
> /usr/share/doc, thus
> freeing /usr of some space. No LVM, no virtualization, no ZFS 
> required)

 This seems to me quite complex, when compared to a graphical interface 
 to resize
 a disk ( as would diskdrake or palimsest be ).

 And of course, that's also something that was tried at Mandriva, with 
 the unfortunate problem
 of "svn full" and "mirror full" problem from some years ago. I am not 
 sure that allowing this
 kind of hack to perpetuate "because it worked on my computer so it 
 would work on my server" is
 a so good idea.  ( on the other hand, if people do unclean stuff, I 
 will have less effort to keep my job
 or to take their )

-- 
 Michael Scherer