LVM Purpose

FredGSanford · 07-29-2008, 03:32 AM

I recently decided to install F9 on a 40gb partition and I noticed during installation, it wanted to create some LVM volumes. I decided to abort the installation for the time being.

The 160gb drive already has Debian and Win Vista installed, so I just wanted to give the 40gb partition to F9 and use the same swap as Debian.

What is the purpose of LVM? In all my linux days, this is the first time I've seen any distro wanting to do this.

Just curious about it and what are some of the benefits of having it.

Thnx.

acid_kewpie · 07-29-2008, 08:03 AM

LVM just gives you more options for flexibility. you can much more easily resize disk volumes, add new ones, spread a single filesystem over multiple disks etc... without adding real partitions on your disk, which could well piss windows off and such.

By default there probably looks to be a negligible benefit for a basic installation, but if it was scaled up it often starts to become extremely useful.

FredGSanford · 07-30-2008, 11:57 AM

Thnx. So it's not important to have it with a standlone desktop system, I assume.

lazlow · 07-30-2008, 03:20 PM

Unless you need to contiguously span several disks, LVM is not worth the headaches it can create. If something goes wrong LVM can be a royal PITA to work with for recovery. You can achieve most of the same advantages of LVM by simply placing the mount point of the next drive within a general access area of the first drive. Except for drives that have huge amounts of data moving in and out daily I avoid LVM like the plague.

FredGSanford · 08-01-2008, 05:23 AM

Thnx. I will avoid it.