The Mess That is Linux Volume Management

"It all started when I installed Gentoo for the first time. Or actually, my friend did it for me - since it was more difficult than installing OpenBSD, as the latter can be done in two minutes. After Slackware, it was the second Linux distribution to touch the platters of my harddrive. I was quite used to the rather rigid partition schemes of OpenBSD, in which /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt and /home all have their own partitions. Not being experienced at all, I remember I thought "1GB must be enough for /usr" only to find out it wasn't if I installed a lot of applications. Normally, such a thing would require re-installation of the OS if it was too difficult to re-partition the disk without losing data."

"That's when my friend said to me: "You know, in Linux there's some way to prevent this kind of problem, by using a system in which you can dynamically resize partitions without even having to reboot your computer!"."

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