On 2020-11-24, antlists <antli...@youngman.org.uk> wrote: > >> Cool, I'll have to read up on using volumes for that. How far back in >> time can you go before you get to distros that would have problems? > > How old is LVM? It's been around for ages, I think.
We regularly run into customers running distros that came out 10 years ago. Not long ago, I was working with a customer who was running RHEL 6 and kernel 2.6.32 on production machines. Yes, RHEL 6 is still supported (though not for long). According to the LVM Wikipedia page, 2.6.32 is old enough that journalling filesystems didn't work correctly on top of LVM. That said, it's quite possible RH backported LVM improvements to 2.6.32 so that's not an issue. Right now, I have a small "grub" partition which has menu that allows chainloading any of dozen or so main partitions, each of which has a linux distro installed (with a bootloader installed in that partition). I've been reading up on LVM vs. grub, and all of the examples I find of booting multiple distros on LVM don't seem to be chainloading. Rather they point the "master" grub at the root "partition" and that partition's .cfg file. However, that assumes that the distro uses grub, and that the .cfg file is compatible with the "master" grub executables. I'd rather not rely on that assumption and just do chainloading like I always have. In grub, does chainloading an LVM virtual partition work the same as chainloading a "real" partition? -- Grant
