Arch Linux

bootiack

Member

Registered: 2007-04-10

Posts: 19

Lvm2

Will Lvm2 or something like it make its way to arch soon?

It is nice to have all disks as a lump of space, and be able to resize the space. (would be nice here at work on a pesky FTP server  had to fix with symlinks)

bender02

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 1,328

Re: Lvm2

It's already there (the module is in the official kernel - called dm-mod, you can load it automatically in rc.conf by enabling USELVM="yes") and the userspace utilities are in the package lvm2). Go for it

chicha

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-04-20

Posts: 271

Re: Lvm2

I am using it on Arch and it work like a charm

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

Re: Lvm2

I am using it on Arch and it work like a charm

me too . but i have one question. is it good to have swap on a lvm2 partition? wouldn't then swap work slower because it can get fragmented or have slower access because of lvm2 ?

klixon

Member

From: Nederland

Registered: 2007-01-17

Posts: 525

Re: Lvm2

and if your want to put your root-partition on lvm, just put 'lvm2' into your HOOKS in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and rebuild your initramfs...
Oh, the lvm2 hooks is included in the lvm2 package, so you'd have to install that first and the rebuild the initramfs

Last edited by klixon (2007-05-11 08:27:22)

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Stand back, intruder, or i'll blast you out of space! I am Klixon and I don't want any dealings with you human lifeforms. I'm a cyborg!

chicha

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-04-20

Posts: 271

Re: Lvm2

is it good to have swap on a lvm2 partition? wouldn't then swap work slower

On a technical point of view I have no idea. My opinion is that you will not see any performance differences with a good old personal computer. Maybe people using big scientific calculators could tell ...

On a functional point of view I do not see a real use case of having a swap within a lvm : lvm is usefull when you change your partition configuration quite often (on a server with multiple harddisks for example). With LVM you can backup, snapshot, move, resize ... very easily. Those kind of operations do not have a lot of sense with a swap partition : this is typically the kind of partition you can destroy and rebuild without taking care of the data hosted on it.

I personnaly always have swap and / outside a LVM.
swap and / have always the same size for me (500 Mo and 10Go respectively) what ever the distribution I am running. Having / within a LVM can be dangerous if some problems occure with the kernel (a bad update for example ).
Then I have volatile data within a lvm : /home, /var, /tmp and others depending on the use of the computer (/backup, /movies ....).

I would conclude by saying that a swap partition is less and less usefull today, because of the size of the memories. My 500M swap is almost never used on my personal computer, even when I perform some movies or photos operations. The only use I see is for suspend to disk ... I even had it deactivated by mistake on a previous Ubuntu installation, and I did not noticed any performance issues ...

Cheers,
Chicha