The case against LVM

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Tue Jul 31 15:02:26 UTC 2007


Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> I've been using LVM on one computer for some time,
> without any real problems.
> 
> However, I've decided that it causes unnecessary complications,
> as some applications do not seem to accept the LVM devices,
> while I don't find any real advantages to compensate.
> 
> I thought it would simplify changing the sizes of partitions,
> but as it happens I never need to do this
> with today's enormous disks.
> 
> I wonder if that is the general experience?

It has its uses, but for most machines, it not only makes no sense it
invites disaster by enabling spanning your filesystem over multiple
drives without redundancy.  I don't think it should be on by default in
Anaconda -- even for laptops with only one possible permanent drive for
example.  But it's not completely useless for higher-end purposes where
it is on top of raided drives.

On a positive note though, I recently repurposed an old laptop to boot
off a 4GB USB stick install of Fedora, naturally without LVM... that
really rocks having the laptop with no moving parts except the fan.  I
found these "dual channel" USB flash sticks are roughly as fast as a
laptop HDD in terms of booting and usage.

-Andy




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