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

Tue Feb 22 11:15:22 CET 2011

+----- "Thorsten van Lil" <tvl83 at gmx.de> wrote:
+
+> Am 22.02.2011 09:07, schrieb Buchan Milne:
+> 
+> > 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.
+> >
+> 
+> That's a good point. The step for partitioning is still the most
+> complex 
+> one during the installation. There are really often questions and 
+> discussions how to partition the hard disk.
+
+Exactly. Dispensing with this requirement would make installation much easier, and still put the user in a position where they aren't setup for failure (all other solutions do, IMHO).
+
+> But, as a user who doesn't know anything about LVM, we should only 
+> switch if the algorithm for LVM works really really stable and is easy
+
+With static partitions, the heuristics have to be good. For LVM, they just have to:
+-Ensure enough space for installation to succeed
+-Ensure a large percentage of the VG is not allocated (as growing is easier than shrinking)
+
+> to use.
+> It seems to me positive to switch to LVM for default but it's not
+> really 
+> important,
+
+You obviously haven't seen how many users have questions about shrinking / from 50GB because they need more space for /home, or similar questions, on IRC.
+
+> so we don't should risk to much and take the time it needs,
+> 
+> instead of forcing it to be finished for the next release, for
+> example.
+
+I listed the issues that I believe block switching to LVM by default. If they are fixed, I would think it would be an idea to launch the first stable release with LVM by default.
+
+Regards,
+Buchan
+