Re: [Maybe Spam] LVM questions (RHEL3) and considerations for LVM2 (in future RHEL4?)

[Chris Adams <cmadams hiwaay net>]

Once upon a time, Al Tobey <albert tobey priority-health com> said:
> /boot was a hack for old hardware with BIOS that couldn't understand
> large (>8GB IIRC) hard drives.   This should not be necessary on modern
> hardware, and besides having your root volume in the first 512MB still
> works around the BIOS bug.

But if you put your root filesystem on LVM, you gain the ability to
shift it around and resize it easily (shifting from disk to disk without
shutting down; resizing ext3 still requires shutting down for now).  You
can unmount /boot while the system is up (so it is easy to move it
around without shutdown anyway).  Putting swap on LVM has the same
advantages.

I partition the disk into a small /boot at the front of the disk and
then one big partition covering the rest to be divided up with LVM.

Also, I mount /boot read-only except when updating kernels (I also mount
/usr read-only except when loading updates).  I've started making /boot
ext2 (i.e. non-journaling; no need since it is small and mounted
read-only).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams hiwaay net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.