Fedora Core 2 LVM & DM Woes

[William R. Lorenz]

Hi Alexandre,

On 18 May 2004, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On May 17, 2004, "William R. Lorenz" <wrl at express.org> wrote:

> > Is there any way I can force my system to use LVM1 without downgrading

> LVM2 binaries, along with DM and the supporting infrastructure in the
> kernel, support both LVM1 and LVM2 on-disk formats.  LVM1 binaries,
> however, don't support DM, and the 2.4 LVM infrastructure in the kernel
> is gone in 2.6, replaced by DM. So, AFAIK, in order to use the lvm-1.*
> binaries, you'll have to go back to 2.6.

First of all, thanks so much for your response! :)

For me, downgrading to a 2.4 kernel isn't a very satisfactory solution, as
I also need the filesystem ACL support, which is included in the 2.6 tree
and available as patches against the 2.4 tree, but not in a form that will
easily integrate with any of the existing RedHat/Fedora kernel RPMs and
their oodles of patches.  This said, I had a choice to either patch in the
ACL support or the unstable 2.6 device-mapper snapshot support, and I
chose to patch in the unstable snapshot support from thornber's archive.  
There's lots of other reasons I like using a 2.6 kernel, too.  I'll have
custom device-mapper kernel RPMs that were tested to work well available
for anyone else that might be interested in using them soon, in the true
spirit of contributing back what I can so that others can use it, too. :)

Even with this, I'm curious as to when the device-mapper snapshot code
will be integrated back into Fedora's 2.6 kernel tree.  I realize that the
obvious answer is "when it's ready," but what does this really imply?  
What still needs to be done with the device-mapper code, in order to have
what the Fedora team considers a stable codebase?  It seems to me that the
snapshot capabilities of LVM are a pretty important thing for those doing
any kind of large-capacity volume management, and I find it hard to
believe it was left to one of the last things to tidy up.  Is there hope?

In any case, thanks so much for your help and guidance.  As much as I wish
that LVM2 had snapshot support out-of-the-box, I do appreciate the great
job you guys do in working on this stuff, and I thank you for that. :)

--          _ 
__ __ ___ _| | William R. Lorenz <wrl at express.org> 
\ V  V / '_| | http://www.clevelandlug.net/ ; "Every revolution was 
 \./\./|_| |_| first a thought in one man's mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson