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If you have a large hard drive and are not sure how you need it partitioned, you can set up the entire disk as a Volume Group in LVM and give your partition str
by iigs 17y ago
If you have a large hard drive and are not sure how you need it partitioned, you can set up the entire disk as a Volume Group in LVM and give your partition structure your best guess with relatively small volumes. Then when you outgrow a volume, extend the volume ( http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html or use distribution GUI tools).
This is relatively uncommon in the Linux world, but it works very well. I believe this is best practice on commercial UNIXes that have logical volume support out of the box (such as AIX). It works particularly well for desktops or servers where you may pre-configure the entire hard drive by default and then add additional drives to the volume group at a later time.
- windsurfer 17y agoI would also like to note that a straight dd on normal partitions does boot correctly, but if you dd an LVM group, it still functions fine! Useful if your hard drive is dying and you need to to a dd-rescue.
- jws 17y agoYou will find that the filesystem barrier operations don't work on LVM except in the very latest kernels. If you want integrity and performance you may not wish to use LVM. Background: The general case is hard. The LVM folk were holding out for the general case but eventually yielded to practicality and coded the easy case (single physical device). Extra work for them, but smiles for users.