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

[Michael Scherer]

Le mardi 22 février 2011 à 03:36 +0100, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
> 2011/2/21 Buchan Milne <bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net>:
> > On Monday, 21 February 2011 11:49:27 Thomas Lottmann wrote:
> >> I am still not convinced of how easy this can be. For having attempted
> >> to manage (and learn) how to manage LVM partitons with CentOS, it is
> >> quite complicated. So it certainly has many advantages, but I'm awaiting
> >> an intuitive disk manager like Diskdrake to manage this stuff without
> >> the need of preliminary knowledge.
> >
> > Yes, with diskdrake, it's no problem. Anaconda's LVM interface is quite
> > confusing and complex. After installation, AFAIK, you can't access the same
> > interface. system-config-lvm (if it's still around) was also pretty unusable.
> >
> > But, we have diskdrake, so why are the problems of CentOS an issue?
> 
> Because (as I remarked earlier) there are people who have other Linux
> flavors on their harddisk before they try Mageia - what if they do
> their partitioning with those (i.e. CentOS)?

Well, if they have already partitions to reuse ( ie, ex centos
partition ), they will just reuse them without lvm and that's all. And
if they do not have any partition to reuse, or just a part of the disk,
we are in the same case, there is free space and we can use it as we
want.

> Again, people do not work all the same. There are people who do their
> partitioning with 3rd-party apps like gparted or others. There are
> people who like to have a bootloader in the root partition of each
> Linux they install (using chainloader in the first Linux' grub), etc.

And what exactly would be broken with lvm and theses schemes ?

Arguments based on "there is some special cases that would requires
special care" are not very helpful if the special case is not described
in details, and we cannot have technical discussion based on imprecise
input. 

> IMHO it is a bad idea to make LVM default, because there are too many
> cases around where people would not want LVM. LVM as an option is a
> far better solution and let the user decide what he wants.

Making it be default doesn't mean that the user cannot decide to opt
out, this argument do not seems very strong.

This is a default, not something that would be forced to use.

And this is not a all or nothing, you can perfectly have a partition in
the lvm, and one outside ( or several, or any mix you want ).  

-- 
Michael Scherer