-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Reinhard Gimbel wrote:
Pascal Bleser wrote:
Fedora (at least on FC4) is taking another interesting direction: from what I've heard, they seem to automatically propose the default partitioning setup with LVM. (I didn't say SUSE should do that as well, I said "interesting" ;)). Has a number of pros and cons.
As long as software-related constructions like LVM keeps stable (i.e. no heavy changes of internal structures ...) that could be an idea.
LVM is stable since quite some time. LVM2 is backwards-compatible with LVM1 metadata (which is stored on the physical disks, means that LVM settings are autodetected at boot time).
One problem could be as soon as you need to access your system for repair using another boot media and the LVM isn't compatible anymore ... Similar things apply to software-RAID as well.
Yes. Although SUSE's rescue system includes LVM and RAID modules and tools (although there's a bug (?) on SUSE 9.1's rescue disk as it doesn't include all the LVM stuff, but it works fine with 9.3's rescue system). I think a real "issue" would rather be that one cannot access LVM nor software RAID partitions from another operating system (say, Windows). There are opensourced Windows drivers available to access ext2 and ext3 but most don't support LVM and software RAID (yet?). Although explore2fs has preliminary support for LVM: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm But then again, that's also a problem with using ReiserFS or XFS ;) It's not really an issue I care about, personally, but that's the "biggest" limitation I see from using LVM and/or RAID. It's been a long time I didn't use Knoppix, but I guess at least the latest version do have LVM and software RAID support as well (as Knoppix is also widely used as a repair system).
To sum up my thoughts: I will stay with "true" partitioning on the harddisk. Might be conservative somehow, but works for my situation pretty good ...
Sure. But I, for myself, would never make a Linux setup without LVM again, it's really a feature I wouldn't want to miss. But then again, I currently have SUSE 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 installed side-by-side so... YMMV ;-) IMHO, it's definately a must-have feature on servers: - - with the LVM snapshot feature, you can make consistent backups of running systems without having to take down anything - - with LVM you can also apply virtual quotas by choosing the size of the Logical Volumes (= "virtual" partitions) in LVM, and which may differ from the physically allocated size in the LV (yes, I know about "quota" but no, it's too limited to me, especially for NFS servers with other operating systems on the client side that don't support lockd) Now, obviously, if you really don't need those features and don't think you need easy and dynamic creation of partitions (now or later), don't use it. One layer/subsystem less is one possible cause of problems less. http://www.suse.com/en/whitepapers/lvm/lvm1.html http://www.suse.com/en/whitepapers/lvm/lvm2.html http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lvm/index.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/ - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDECwir3NMWliFcXcRAtYsAKC7OSM0WEec/qYlnSLX4a0oQd0KUACdGEHk Sy81wvoT75annz/YwNmYUjY= =tk4z -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----