Philip Webb schrieb:
Does anyone have advice based on experience using LVM ?
I sb partitioning a new 320 GB hard drive soon for a simple desktop box.
That is 8 times the size of the HDD in my present machine,
which I haven't exhausted by any means. LVM seems more professional
& allows flexibility for unforeseen storage needs,
but it adds a layer of complexity & potential problems arising therefrom.
I wonder whether LVM slows down disk access
& whether there's a disaster lurking unseen if anything goes wrong with LVM:
a bad package update, a damaged config file or file storing LVM's layout
would seem to risk losing everything on the HDD & require re-installation.
Simple pros and cons?
Pro:
More flexible, especially when using a special setup [1], can easily be
expanded to RAID1 and/or RAID0 (even both at the same time!).
Cons:
- Can't be used with Windows. Even worse, Windows sees the partition as
unformatted rather than unknown and therefore might have no problem
formatting it without warning.
- Can't be used for /boot, usage for / needs initrd (my advice: keep
/boot, /bin, /sbin and /etc on a normal partition).
- It's one more thing that can break.
- You can't use *parted to resize the underlying partitions.
- I had trouble mounting my lvm /home partition (mirrored) with Ubuntu,
possibly a missing kernel module in the default kernel or missing use
flag. I didn't try to fix it, though.
- You loose bit performance, but not much, you won't feel it without
benchmarks.
[1]
Some simple advices: Create small logical volumes. It's easier to expand
them than to shrink them (expanding reiserfs takes less than 5 minutes).
If you are not shure wether you might need more space on ordinary dos
partitions later on, don't create one big partition for lvm but several
smaller. That makes management a bit more complicated (especially when
you are unfamiliar with the tools and/ or have several physical disks)
but you can simply reformat one of them if the need arises (see "man
pvmove" for more information).
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