Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Gentoo it's easy to get away with not using an initramfs. Everything > is built from source and you roll your own kernel so we don't need to > jump through the boot time hoops that a binary distro must to be able > to support everything and boot. > > You will always have a pretty good idea how much space / needs, it > contains /bin, /sbin, /etc, /root and /lib. Unless oyu are in the habit > of storing stuff in /root, 500M is plenty. So put / on a regular > partition, everything else in LVM and your initramfs worries go away.
Ok, I was suspecting that putting / outside of LVM might be the solution. Thanks for confirming. > The only case I can think of that *requires* initramfs right now is > booting off a raid device Strangely enough, I am currently booting from a software raid device, so you don't need an initramfs for that either. >> And from what I remember, you can't resize a mounted ext3 partition, > > balls. ext2online and resize2fs have been resizing ext3 partitions for > ages. You can extend a mounted partition with ease and in safety. Have you ever tried pulling the plug while a resize operation was in progress? I guess I'll have to test this myself, as my data is valuable enough to me that I won't just believe what I read. I wasn't aware of ext2online. Doesn't it require a kernel patch? Is it integrated in gentoo-sources? The homepage seems to indicate that it hasn't been updated since 2000. > What you can't do, and to my knowledge no regular fs can do, is to > *reduce* a mounted partition But who would want to do that? I always need *more* space, not less ;-) > Why would lvm not be on your rescue disk? That's just a silly excuse. > What would you do with a reswcue disk that doesn't have fdisk on it? > You'd throw it away and get a different one. Well, I haven't spent much time looking at rescue CDs, I have always used Knoppix up to now and it has been good enough. I'll just check that recent LVM tools are on it. >> But I'd love to be proven wrong on all the points above! This would >> certainly motivate me to look into LVM seriously this time. It really >> seems to be the right solution to the various problems I have seen >> with static partitions. > > You are imagining problems where none exist :-) Not quite. I have a memory of problems that have existed but thankfully have been fixed since. Anything special if I put the LVM over a software raid? -- Remy
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