The one caveat I'd lay out is: DON'T. There are only a couple of arguments pro, and zillions of arguments con. The con argument that carries the most weight with me is that you can recover from most any other disk disaster _except_ the corruption of your root device.
As has been suggested, I make all of the 1st level subdirectories separate mount points, and place their contents on non-root devices (LVMs, even!!). I only keep the directories needed for booting (/etc, /bin, /sbin, /boot, /lib ... CAUTION: this list might not be complete!! I'm working off the top of my head...) on the root device. Once you've done this, you won't have any reason to make your root device LVM -- it will turn out to be very manageable in terms of size. If you wanna use that extra space on the root device, go ahead and partition it, and give partition 2 over to LVM for use. Bottom line: there are a few disaster cases where having your root device LVMed would make your system unbootable. I haven't sat down to count them all, but they exist. I use LVM for everything except the root disk. LVM has lots of value for allocations that exceed physical device bounds: a well-administered root device isn't one of them. As to the quality of LVM overall: backup your filesystems with filesystem-independent tools (like tar, Amanda, TSM, etc). Do not trust disk surface in the long run: it _can_ go bad, LVM or not. LVM just adds one more layer of potential data scrambling ... never a good thing when you're up to your waist in a disaster. LVM works very well, and I've found it so far to be very reliable (2 years in service now); but you don't want to deal with that extra layer in a disaster context, and you gain nothing from putting a well-thought-out root device under LVM control. Peace, --Jim-- James S. Tison Senior Software Engineer TPF Laboratory / Architecture IBM Corporation Meum cerebrum nocet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
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