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On Saturday 26 March 2011 15:36:19 Mark Knecht wrote: |
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> Dale, |
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> I understand your position and concerns. While I have a number of |
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> systems, I have little time or patience for dealing with a lot of this |
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> stuff and LVM has been one of them. |
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> |
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> One thing I'm considering to try out LVM is a second Gentoo |
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> installation on an already running system. It will either be a 50GB |
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> partition of its own, or a Virtualbox VM. I'd do the normal Gentoo |
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> install for LVM, figure out how it works, etc., and then decide if I |
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> want to use it in the future. |
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Well I can help with that, or at least provide some tips. Delivering Red Hat's |
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training courses exposes you to all the weird and wonderful ways people |
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misunderstand LVM and the even weirder ways gnome tools present the subject... |
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Logically, LVM sits between your physical disks (or raid arrays if you use |
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that) and the filesystem. All it is is a way to manipulate these things called |
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"block devices" in ways that you normally can't do without LVM. |
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Like if you have 4 partitions on a disk and want to make the third one bigger. |
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Using just fdisk, you can't do that without making backups and restoring. Or |
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creating a filesystem larger than any one disk. |
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So LVM takes a bunch of disks or arrays and lets you combine them in ways you |
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want them (not ways the hardware forces you to have them). And that's all it |
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does - forget all the nonsense in the man pages about aligning stripes to make |
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mirrors - that just confuses people and makes them think it's some fancy raid. |
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You could argue that LVM exposes too much complexity by letting you see the |
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physical volumes (pv), volume groups (vg) and logical volumes (lv), and I |
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won't argue with that. It's a trade between flexibility and complexity. I'm |
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happy with it, others might not be. |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |