Booting - Enterprise Volume Management System

Toby Kelsey toby_kelsey at ntlworld.com
Fri Aug 11 09:47:17 UTC 2006


David Abrahams wrote:
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/benefitsoflvmsmall.html

Interesting.  Looking at the HOWTO, it seems that LVM combines the main 
disadvantage of separate partitions - having to manually unmount and resize when 
you run out of space - with the main disadvantage of one big partition - 
allowing fs corruption and installers to affect user and system data together. 
I suppose you could use it as a poor man's quota system, but we already have 
good user and group quotas.

The main advantage appears being able to resize logical volumes and filesystems 
easily, but for jfs "this is extremely error prone" and even for ext2/3 "there 
is currently no e2fsadm equivalent for LVM 2 and the e2fsadm that ships with LVM 
1 does not work with LVM 2" so it all seems a bit too unstable to trust to 
novices.  Since you cannot shrink xfs and jfs the main functionality becomes 
useless for many advanced users.

While it may be useful for servers, with confidence-building statements like "it 
seems that the online resizing patch is rather dangerous" I would suggest it is 
not yet suitable for a home or laptop system.

Toby




More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list