On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 02:42:36AM +0800, Andy Sy wrote: > What kind of problems did you encounter? Was lvm per se > flaky or did it have to do with just the initial boot-up > sequence? >
Well, the main problem was mostly from the fact that the initrd that lvmcreate_initrd makes is somewhat fragile, and it's very easy to create a system that fails to boot if things go badly wrong, or even if things change slightly in the system. This happened to me more than a few times on Gentoo. > I'm going to be deploying a more-or-less mission-critical > setup and thought that lvm was mature enough to be used on > such, would you advise against it? > LVM itself is mature enough to be used in a mission critical environment. We have several such systems in active deployment, even logical volumes on shared disks, but putting the root filesystem on LVM is a tricky business as you're finding, and in my opinion, not worth the trouble. The only advantage to putting the root filesystem on LVM is if you are using a filesystem that supports online resizing (like ReiserFS or XFS), and I've found that the root partition doesn't need resizing all that much in practice, so the utility of this trick is limited. > It turns out you don't even need a separate /boot partition > to boot off of a root LVM partition. LILO is able to load > the kernel directly from an LVM partition. In this setup > I'm experimenting with, I was able to make everything reside > in an lvm volume group, including my swap devices. > Note that there's a performance hit to using a logical volume as swap, and it's generally not recommended. > Otoh, I can't seem to get rid of the requirement to use an initrd. > Even though all the initrd really does is to run vgscan/vgchange -ay > (no pivot_root necessary), there still seems to be some black magic > involved in that. > Exactly. That's why I don't think it's worth the trouble. -- He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
