Logical Volumes vs. Partitions - the way of things

[Bob McClure Jr]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 10:48:02PM -0500, Dennis D. Calhoun wrote:
> Hello Mr. Stevens;
> 
> Firstly, I've admired and respected your insights, obviously deep
> knowledge, and more than substantial contributions to this list for many
> years. I've learned much in the process and still have a great deal more
> to learn.
> 
> My comment and question: Logical Volumes offer much more capability, in a
> number of ways, than old fashioned partitions do. However, many current
> operating systems cannot boot from a logical volume. What can you share
> with us about this paradox?

If I may interject my experiences, it's not a big problem.  I
partition my drives with two 100MB partitions for alternative boot
filesystems, and all the rest is one large partition which is devoted
to the physical volume.  Then I allocate logical volumes as desired
for /, /home, /var/log, /var/spool, /var/www, and so on.

One caution - you should probably make another small, say, 2GB
partition for /, and put, say, /usr in a logical volume, because LVM
keeps its information in /etc, and it really doesn't like mucking with
an LV containing its data.  I've not had to resize a root filesystem,
yet, so I've not been bitten by this problem.  But I keep duplicate
root filesystems, so I can always boot to the alternate to resize the
current one.

> Afterword: I don't know enough about the current Linux offerings to know
> whether or not any Flavor of Linux can boot from a Logical Volume, but I
> do know that Windows, of any flavor, cannot.

To my knowledge none do because it has to load the kernel before it
knows anything about LVM.

> Sincerely,
> Dennis D. Calhoun, MCSA

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
bob at bobcatos.com             http://www.bobcatos.com
Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence
before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his
commands and do what pleases him.  1 John 3:21-22 (NIV)