With all the words of LVM2 going on, I feel it is only appropriate to also mention the risk.
On a desktop I had installed LVM2 considering that I did need to upgrade partitions every now and then and my previous solution was add another drive/partition and cross mount - e.g. like done with /usr/local under /usr, which worked fairly well. LVM2 worked great - until one of the drives crashed and I was trying to figure out what was on it. From that pov, volume management is a pain. I did figure out what I had mounted to it - but only after deconstructing the LVM configuration file to match it up with what I had put there. (And no, I had not yet gotten to doing an LVM soft-RAID solution to map a single LVM partition to two drives, which would certainly have helped.) I got my system working by adding a new drive that was not part of the volume group, and removing the old drives from the volume group. Fortunately, I had my volume setup so that they one partition was not made up of non-overlaping partitions on different drives. (e.g. partition A = sda1 + sda2 instead of sda1 + sdb1.) So, unless you are looking to use LVM in a soft-RAID solution between multiple physical drives, not multiple partitions on the same drive, (e.g. partition A = sda1 + sda2, with mirror on sdb1+sdb2), then I would not suggest it as should anything happen, it'll make data recovery that much harder. Just 2 cents for the pot. Ben ----- Original Message ---- From: Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2009 4:57:55 PM Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] extending /usr partition... On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:39:08 +0100, Jarry wrote: > I remember having lvm2 a few years ago, and despite of that I could not > extend any partition, which was being used. What is then lvm2 good for, > if I can not extend partitions on-the-fly? I can not unmount /usr before > extending... You can extend partitions on the fly with LVM2, and have always been able to, provided you have free space in its volume group. Was it the partition you had trouble resizing or the filesystem? That's a separate step and is dependent on the tools available for the particular filesystem on use. It is certainly possible to extend a mounted ext3 filesystem now, but that may not have always been the case. -- Neil Bothwick Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
