On Sunday 12 February 2006 06:45, Jarry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-user] Max Number of Partitions': > Alexander Skwar wrote: > > Shawn Haggett wrote: > >>LVM would indeed be a solution. Instead of creating many disk > >>partitions, you would simply create one large one the size of the > >> disk. > > > > Yes, you could. But if you go that way, you don't have to create > > any partitions at all. Instead, you can also use "/dev/hda" with LVM. > > There are some limitations concerning lvm. I remember it is not > recommended to use it for <swap>, root and /boot (and probably > some more)...
Some distros (kubuntu, I believe) use LVM swap by default if you use LVM. While this could theoretically cause a problem, I'm fairly sure that any problem encountered would be an acceptable lvm2 or device-mapper bug. Putting swap on LVM does have the distinct advantage of allowing swap to be resized when you add or remove (!) ram -- I like swap to be ~2x ram. I do not run LVM on swap, but that's because my swap is a resizable hw raid 0 volume that I wouldn't want to store other data on. (Data goes on raid 5 or 6.) It's not possible without some trickery to run /boot on LVM, since grub doesn't understand lvm and won't be able to find your files. Lilo may make this possible, but I keep my /boot off of LVM because I prefer grub and it feels right to make boot a real partition. Root on LVM is entirely possible. I've run that way since I initially installed linux (well, initially, this time around). You do have to create either an initrd or an initramfs that loads any needed modules that are not built in and activates the lvm logical volumes; genkernel can do this for you on gentoo. Other distros also provide tools to do the same thing, I recommend placing root on LVM for the same reasons any mount point goes on LVM: dynamic growing and shrinking of the filesystem. Ext2/3, JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS all support growing a filesystem without unmounting it, I believe (I only use reiserfs). [Shrinking a filesystem is another box of rocks, but I've done it successfully may a time.] If you only have a single hard disk my recommended layout is: /hda /hda1 -- /boot as big as you need it. I use 1G, but that's overkill for most people. /hda2 -- extended partition container /hda5 -- space remaining after /boot and swap as a single LVM physical volume /hda6 -- swap; 2x RAM You can than create a volume group with your single physical volume and begin cutting logical volumes out of it. The default limit to the number of logical volumes in a volume group is 255. When you need more storage you can add another hard drive, create a physical volume out of the whole drive (no need to partition), extend your volume group, and start growing your logical volumes across the new drive -- with no downtime if the drave can be hot plugged. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
