Installation plays hardball

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2010-01-02 at 20:10 +1030, Tim wrote:
> If you're the sort that uses one huge partition for everything (and
> that does seem to be the recommendation, these days), *and* you never
> intend to add a second drive, then LVM is pointless to you.

I keep /, /boot and /home on separate partitions and am happy with how
it works. If / grows too large I will move something (e.g. /var/cache)
to a directory on /home (or on a second drive) and point to it.

There's no problem in adding a second drive as long as you don't expect
to merge it into an existing filesystem below the API level (which is
what LVM allows). The downside of LVM is that a failure of one of the
drives will leave you completely borked in the LVM case and only
partially borked in the non-LVM case. If you're careful about how you
distribute your filesystem you can reduce the impact, whereas with LVM
you have absolutely no control over where it places files.

poc