Hello, Alan. On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 00:15:35 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 15/09/2017 23:43, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 23:38:21 +0200, Marc Joliet wrote: > >> Am Freitag, 15. September 2017, 23:15:05 CEST schrieb Alan Mackenzie: > >>> Yes, but do I want it to go away? What is it, what does it do?
> >>> OK, let's try emerge -s thin-provisioning-tools. We get back only > >>> patronising garbage, namely "A suite of tools for thin provisioning on > >>> Linux" - well, duh! Who write's this stuff? > >>> So, WTF is thin provisioning? > >> I'm tempted to ask whether google is down or something, but I'm tired and > >> waiting for 7z to finish so here you go anyway: > > For me, google is permanently down. > >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_provisioning > > Yes, I've read it, thanks. My question above was somewhat rhetorical. > >> I would say you probably don't need to care about it. > > I do. I need to spend time and effort removing it. It sounds like > > something only useful in servers, yet I have a desktop profile installed. > > There's something not quite right, here. > Reign in the paranoia there friend. This is Gentoo and you have choices. > You are getting lvm because you elected to get it, it's set somewhere in > your USE. No, I actually use LVM to massage partition sizes, (but not for anything else). > What is LVM? A tool for managing disk volumes. If you don't know what it > is, you probably don't need it. On my last machine, I only used it once or twice (to increase partition sizes), but without it I would have spent a lot of time creating partitions, copying stuff across, and so on. I might need it more on my new machine, which has only 500Gb of SSD (as compared with 1Tb of HDD). > What is thin-provisioning? A way to allocate space on your disks without > actually using it until you put real data in. So a say 50G volume that > is empty will consume no disk space (or maybe a few K in overhead). Sort > of like sparse files for entire volumes. Thanks. It sounds like something which, if you don't know what it is, you don't need. And reading the Gentoo wiki article, it seems that there are some gotchas associated with it. I don't think the USE flag `thin' should have been enabled by default. I'm going to disable it, now I know what it is. What really got up my nose, as mentioned above, was doing an emerge -s on thing-provisioning-tools and getting told it was "tools for thin provisioning". What really takes up time maintaining a computer, or programming for that matter, is continually having to look somewhere else for something. Even though I doubt it was deliberately designed to annoy, that emerge -s entry could hardly have been more annoying if somebody had tried to make it so. > -- > Alan McKinnon > [email protected] -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
