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

Jeff Robins jeffrobinssae at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 17:56:22 CET 2011


> Michael Scherer wrote:
> >
> > For a linux system, a lvm logical volume is just another disk.
> >
>

I've had issues in the past because Linux considered LVM just one logical
disk and I think the average user would eventually have the same problem as
well.  I think moving to LVM as the default will create too many complaints
and support requests in the end.

A long time ago I had a system with 6 SCSI disks, each 1.2GB.  The system
was fairly useless with the single disks, but using LVM I had 1 disk of
reasonable size.  I ran the system for about a year with no problems, but
then 1 of the disks failed.  Normally this would be a medium inconvenience,
because I would just have to restore the files from that one drive to
another drive. However, with the LVM, I lost the ability to read the entire
LVM.  I had to restore the entire system, which was a much bigger pain.  I
also could not obtain a disk of the same small size for a reasonable price,
which I was told would make the problem even bigger.

If I had used some redundancy, then I might have been able to restore the
one disk, but I was a novice user and didn't understand the need.  I think
that most users who use the defaults and probably novice users, or at least
will be after Mageia takes off.  I think LVM support is a must, but I think
making it the default, without also making some redundancy the default, will
cause more problems than it solves.

--Jeff
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