I just installed FC4 and am curious about a few things.

Rather than referring to hda1, hda2, and hda3, like RH9 did, (where hda2 was / and hda3 was swap), FC4 appears to have the old hda2 and hda3 as two parts of a physical volume (LVM).

1. Is this the prefered set-up?

2. Will I get get better performance if I make the swap file something other than a part of the LVM group?

3. Why does the FSTAB and KDiskFree show the file type for the logical volume as LVM, and not as ext3, which I know it is?

Thanks,

Moxieman99

1. it's a lot more flexible for the end user, so can have substantial benefits in either the desktop or server roles.

2. I would not believe so, but don't have any evidence either way.

3. can you show us these? my lvm partitions are mounted as ext3 / resierfs / swap etc...

3. can you show us these? my lvm partitions are mounted as ext3 / resierfs / swap etc...
_____________________________________________
I have to drill down through various layers of options or use various other applications (not the ones initially offered up when check on the disk) to find that the LVM (both swap and primary) is, in fact, ext3 (My fstab file doesn't break out the LVM into two (swap and primary) components, either, which I found vaguely peturbing for some reason).

I am simply curious because as I experiment more and more with the nuts-and-bolts of Linux, I want to understand what is going on (I don't mind trashing my system in the process, I just want to understand in the end why it was trashed in the process).

I wanted to see how I could split my hard drive (80 gig) into 2 40s, and make one a FAT drive so that when I tried dual booting/networking/whatever, a Windows system and Linux could read/write the common FAT drive. Unfortunately, just as WinXP insists on formatting every partition it touches as NTFS, Fedora Core 4 only gave me the option of formatting both partitions that I wanted to create as ext3 or ext2. Yes, I could eventually reach an option to format a portion as vFAT, but it was neither easy nor unintuitive (Bear in mind that I have zero experience in disc partitioning).

Then there's the small question of someone on the board stating that more than one install of Linux can shall the same swap partition, and by understanding the concept of LVMs, I can understand why and how I can have two installs share the same swap. I don't have a problem with the concept (like the possibility of using one ground for the electrical system of an entire house), I just want to understand the hows, whys, and wherefores, of sharing a logical partition group.

Finally and most importantly, there's the fact that I'm a very concrete kind of person. I want to understand how they (LVMs) work so I can get comfortable with engineering a hard disk to share what appears to be a concept and not physical sections x to x+n of a disc.

Purely curiousity, nothing more.

Moxieman99

Use fdisk to create a partition and use mkdosfs to format it as vfat.

See:
man fdisk
man mkdosfs

Examples:
fdisk /dev/hda
(followed by “m” to see a listing of options)
(be sure to “w” write your final selections or “q” to bailout and save nothing)
mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda...
See the Linux Partition HowTo: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...Partition.html Pay extra attention to section 3.5 “Swap Partitions”. Swap space is essentially very slow memory, which like the RAM in your system, can be reused by the next linux OS that you run.
See the LVM HowTo: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...LVM-HOWTO.html Pay extra attention to Chapter 11 “Common Tasks”. FC4 uses LVM2.

Thanks, WHN, I'll check the sources out.

mm99