I've gotten to the point where I won't recommend to anyone that they put their root partition on RAID/LVM/what have you. I would make my root partition ext2/3 (including /etc and /boot), and have the rest be either LVM or RAID. RAID if you don't anticipate having to add/remove a particular volume from the array. LVM if you do.
As Adam pointed out, this might be a good candidate for access your storage array as an open systems device, and just carve out a big enough piece to hold all of /usr. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Jim Sibley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 12:32 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: size of distributions (redux) Sorry for the shortened post just now. This is the complete post: I've been playing with several of the new distributions and they have one thing in common - the size of the /usr directory is growing rapidly. In early distributions, you could contain a zLinux system on one 3390-3 image. Now, its taking two or three if you need to install all the development libraries. I am reluctant to go to larger volume images because larger images put more data behind a subchannel and since zLinux does not support PAV's there is a potential performance bottleneck for the I/O. So far, I have tried 3 approaches to contian the problem: 1) two volume images, but /usr is 70-80% full and does not allow for growth: /dev/dasda1 / /dev/dasdb1 /usr 2) three volumes seems to be a bit better /dev/dasda1 / /dev/dasdb1 /usr /dev/dasdc1 /usr/share (uses /usr/share as a mountpoint) Approaches 1 and 2, I would suspect, would grow in complexity as the distributions grow. 3) a combination of raid and real partitions. This improves performance and the size of the system volume but does it lead to recovery problems? I have put /etc on a "real" partition so that the systems parms can be accessed directly for recovery, especially /etc/raidtab. /dev/dasda1 /boot /dev/dasda2 /etc /dev/dasda3 swap /dev/md0 / (raid0) /dev/dasdb /dev/dasdc /dev/dasde Given that larger images beyond 3390-3 can be performance problems w/o PAV's, what are the pros and cons of the above 3 approaches? Are there other approaches to setting up the system. (All three methods, above, can be done during the initial cd-rom install). ===== Jim Sibley Implementor of Linux on zSeries in the beautiful Silicon Valley "Computer are useless.They can only give answers." Pablo Picasso __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
