fc9 and rhel5 shared /boot and lvm coexistence

[Chris Snook]

John Priddy wrote:
> So I would like to have rhel5 and fc9 coexisting on the same physical 
> disk.  My questions/concerns are as follows:
> 
> 1.  Is there any issue with sharing the /boot mountpoint/partition 
> between both?
> 
> 2.  I haven't worked a lot with shuffling around VGs, but how about 
> sharing lvm volumes in general?  If I create some generic (not root) lvm 
> volume and lay down an ext3 filesystem in FC9 should I expect any 
> problems when trying to mount the same in RHEL5?  Is there any issue I 
> should be aware of regarding differing versions of lvm?  Is it worth 
> while/possible to share the swap volume -- lets say I put the computer 
> into hibernate in FC9, then later on I boot up into RHEL5, whats the 
> worst thats going to happen?
> 
> 3.  Anyone else out there doing something like this that has any 
> additional advice?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> John
> 

It works, but it can be a pain in the ass.  Personally, I prefer to have 
separate /boot partitions, and chainload them from the first one, which holds 
the oldest distro.  That way, if a new distro adds features that are 
incompatible with an older bootloader, each OS is still being loaded by its own 
bootloader.  The only catch is that you have to be careful and make sure that 
when installing the non-primary distros that you put the bootloader on the /boot 
partition, not on the MBR.

Anaconda makes it very easy to create a chainload entry pointing to another 
partition.  I usually leave a few GB of space free so I can create extra /boot 
partitions at will, and put all the rest in LVM.

-- Chris