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Hi,
houghi wrote:
> Is there a reason that /boot is on a seperate partition? I do not know
> LVM, so I can only guess that the reason is that LVM is not directly
> bootable.
Accessing LVM requires a kernel that can read the LVM info stored on the
disk. A plain BIOS can't do that, and I am not sure about a boot manager
like GRUB. The kernel loads the LVM drivers via the initrd, which is
located on a "plain" /boot partition in my case. Once the initrd is
booted, it can read and access all other file systems located inside the
LVM.
> As we had a LONG discussion where it was decided to have /home on a
> seperate discussion, this would lead to the following solution if we
> should decide to go with LVM
> 1 reiser partition /boot to make it bootable
Why ReiserFS for /boot? This file system rarely changes and the journal
would just require additional disk space. Plain ext2 is sufficient.
> 1 LVM partition /
> 1 LVM partition /home
Correct, this is in essence how I handle it here. Nitpick: it's called a
"LV (logical volume)", not "partition" in LVM terms. See the LVM HOWTO
for a detailed explanation of the terminology used there. Just to avoid
confusion :)
So yes, the partitioner would need to create two additional regular
partitions:
- a small one (~100MB is more than sufficient) for /boot
- a large one to house the logical volumes for /home and the root file
system
This can be either a primary or an extended partition, of course.
To give a concrete example - this is how my laptop disk (80GB) is
partitioned:
/dev/hda1 (~20GB) - Windows XP (NTFS)
/dev/hda2 (~150MB) - Linux /boot (ext2)
/dev/hda3 (~1.5GB) - Linux swap (as the current suspend to disk kernel
code requires swap to be outside the LVM - swsusp2
has fixed that and can suspend to swap managed by
the device mapper)
/dev/hda4 (~58GB) - Linux LVM
/boot is actually shared between 10.1 and 10.0 - as both use different
file names for the kernel and initrd files, there is no conflict. If
only YaST2 would take care of existing entries in GRUB's menu.lst - I
currently have to manually re-add some entries after a fresh installation.
Inside the LVM I currently have defined the following volumes:
suse101root (7GB) - SuSE Linux 10.1 root file system (ReiserFS)
suse10root (7GB) - SUSE Linux 10.0 root file system (ReiserFS)
cryptohome (10GB) - Encrypted /home file system (ReiserFS)
usrlocal (2GB) - /usr/local (ReiserFS)
Once I have finished my transition from SUSE 10.0 to 10.1, I can simply
discard the suse10root volume and re-use the disk space e.g. for a SUSE
10.2 test root filesystem, creating a short-term "scratch" file system
or for increasing any of the other volumes, in case they run out of
space. No repartitioning required!
> To explain: the seperate /home is not so much about size as it is about
> keeping your data and settings with a new installation.
Exactly, this works very well and should of course be kept. LVM would
just make this even more flexible, as you can resize /home dynamically
without repartitioning (in case your MP3 collection grows ;) )
> If there is no real reason to have a seperate /boot, then it would still
> make sence to have a seperate / and /home as we have now.
Definitely. LVM won't get into the way of this scheme of separating file
systems. Quite the contrary, it would allow some additional flexibility!
Bye,
LenZ
- --
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Lenz Grimmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -o)
[ICQ: 160767607 | Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] /\\
http://www.lenzg.org/ V_V
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