The Mess That is Linux Volume Management

Jul 24, 2008, 21:05 (2 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Hans Kwint)

"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!"."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• LVM Quick Command Reference For Linux And Unix(Jun 18, 2008)
• Monitoring and Display Commands For LVM On Linux And Unix(Jun 12, 2008)
• Managing LVM with the LVM Manager(Mar 18, 2008)
• Manage Linux Storage with LVM and Smartctl(Mar 13, 2008)