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

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.
+