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

Maarten Vanraes maarten.vanraes at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 10:50:08 CET 2011


Op maandag 21 februari 2011 10:36:15 schreef Thierry Vignaud:
> On 21 February 2011 08:51, P. Christeas <p_christ at hol.gr> wrote:
> >> 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.
> > 
> > (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)
> 
> It's not as easy as LVM (need to use a partitionner).
> Diskdrake and the like will force you to umount the partitions to resize
> which may needs to boot on a rescue CD (eg for resizing / fs)
> It may not be possible ie:
> 
> - you already have 4 primary partitions and none of them is an extended
> one.
> 
> - If you've a small 8Go partition at start of the disk followed by one
> To partition
>   and you want to increase the first one, you're screwed without LVM
>   With LVM, you can just got some free space from anywhere (even another
> disk)
> 
> What's more, one gains many features:
> 
> - snapshots (yes snapshots for sql db backups are not for end users) but
> still usefull for saving the whole system at one fixed time
> 
> - you can extend some filesystems from space from other disks
> 
> - it's easier to add space where needed when defaults partitions sizing
> proved to be altered after some usage
> 
> - one can live resize (w/o umouting/remounting)
> 
> - one can use snapshots in order to rollback dangerous update
>   (eg: for trying initscript -> systemd switch, ...)
> 
> I think it brings many usefull features.
> Those who don't want LVM could still do manual partitionning.

if we switch from ext4 to btrfs next year or so, we will have snapshotting and 
a lot of other usefull features.


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