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

Tue Feb 22 09:07:18 CET 2011

+----- "Wolfgang Bornath" <molch.b at googlemail.com> wrote:
+
+> 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)?
+
+Irrelevant. If there is free space, you can use LVM or not. Note CentOS defaults to LVM as of 5.x. If the whole disk is partitioned as a PV (likely with CentOS), then you will be forced to use LVM anyway ...
+
+> Again, people do not work all the same.
+
+Irrelevant. If this was the case, we would *FORCE* everyone to use LVM, or a large single root filesystem, or a complex layout, or something else. But we aren't discussing forcing of anything, just what the *default* option should be.
+
+> There are people who do their
+> partitioning with 3rd-party apps like gparted or others.
+
+Then they should not use the default, if they think they know better.
+
+> 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.
+
+Shame, IMHO putting bootloader in root partition is a bad idea. But, they can still do this. They can even install a bootloader in the boot partition of each distro, and use chainloader (which is what I do). No one is proposing preventing them from doing this.
+
+> IMHO it is a bad idea to make LVM default, because there are too many
+> cases around where people would not want LVM.
+
+IMHO, the majority of users *should* use LVM. The 10% who have specific reasons not to, will of course still be able to use normal partitions. The problem currently is that I suspect 90% of the users who should be using LVM, don't. Then, they need assistance from others to resize their /, or /home, or another filesystem that they sized incorrectly during installation.
+
+Users shouldn't need to "learn to partition", or "practice installing", by doing installations over and over until they figure out that / should be at least 10GB, but most likely not larger than 30GB, depending on whether they compile a lot (e.g. build packages or not).
+
+Is this really user-friendly? By this I mean, friendly to users who *haven't* used Linux before, not those who are installing their 10th distro on the same machine for the 15th time.
+
+> LVM as an option is a
+> far better solution and let the user decide what he wants.
+
+The user will still *always* be able to decide what he wants. The question is, what to do for users who don't know what to decide. IMHO, for a first time user, it is *much* better to give them a "Use available space, with growable filesystems" or similar, than a statically partitioned, based on difficult-to-get-right heuristics.
+
+Regards,
+Buchan
+