On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 11:53, Peter Long wrote: > Hi all, > > I am getting ready to try out a fresh install of gentoo. I want to use > LVM2. I have been reading through the LVM Howto for the last 45 minutes > and I am still a little confused. Can I setup my disks using LVM2 at > install time? Also, can the /boot filesytem be on LVM, or do I have to > set it up as a regular partition? I have one 30GB drive in this system > on /dev/hde. I suspect I will have to configure it as follows. If anyone > has a better suggestion please let me know. > > /dev/hde1 /boot ~32M > /dev/hde2 swap 1GB * > /dev/hde3 a LVM volume group, split into /,/home and maybe /var > > * (I have 1GB of RAM, do I really need 2GB of swap?) > > Is it possible to install /boot on a logical volume? I guess putting > swap on a LV does not make any sense (assuming it is possible). > > This machine will be my linux play machine. I will be messing with it a > lot. It will not be expected to be VERY secure since it will be behind > my firewall/mail server machine. (Although I may want it to serve as a > backup firewall machine. Not sure yet.) > > -- > Peter Long > I haven't played with Gentoo much, but with other distributions you can setup LVM during the install and even put /boot in the LVM.
My personal opinion is that it is a very bad idea to make /boot anything but EXT2 (or EXT3 if it is supported natively in your kernel). On systems where I'm using LVM, I generally setup /boot as its own partition (150Mb to 200Mb, which is way overkill), and then the rest of the drive gets setup as part of the LVM. I have several production (client) machines setup this way, and the disk I/O is really good on all partitions - better than running straight EXT2 partitions directly off the drives. Of course the drives are all SCSI on these production boxes. I would guess that using the LVM for a /var ext2 partition (on a web proxy or mail server) gives me an added 10% to 20% speed boost for disk I/O. Anyone have any hard stats on their installs? Good Luck - Jon Carnes. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
