Getting rid of /boot

[Ryan Lynch]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 19:45, Marc Wilson <msw at cox.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm...
>
> Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still
> defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot.  This brings
> no benefit to most users.


With all due respect, the fact that one of us can't imagine the need
for some technology doesn't say much, one way or another, about
whether a general use case exists. In general, I find this attitude
amusing, but you may have a point W.R.T. LVM.

Some people have high skill and comfort levels working with LVM, and
find all sorts of helpful uses for it. (Me, for instance.) But I work
with more experienced UNIX/Linux admins who start cussing and moaning
whenever they need to interact with it, and if you offer to help, the
answer is often something along the lines of "You can help by getting
rid of LVM!" I see similar sentiments on the mailing lists, too--some
people really dislike it.

I wonder whether it might be a solution in search of a problem. I can
rattle off a list of LVM applications that have helped me, in the past
(live backups w/ snapshotting, transparent expansion across new
disks), but that never seems to convince the anti-LVM crowd. When we
get into lunch-hour debates about the merits and flaws, the usual
responses are along the lines of "But you wouldn't *need* to do any of
those things, if you'd designed your system correctly." I think you
made a similar point, in your emails.

But the flexibility is great, and I can think of dozens of situations
where LVM's features saved me hours and days of time, or an
inconvenient reboot, or just simplified some disk operation for me. I
think the difference is that I know LVM *really* well, so I'm never
frustrated by having to remember how the hell some obscure command
option is supposed to work, or how to recover a VG with a missing PV
when a RAID disk fails.

But just to bring this back to the topic: From the day that Fedora
re-unites /boot and / on a single LVM volume, I will henceforce script
a YUM pre-upgrade hook that automatically takes a "before" snapshot of
the entire system, for idiot-proof rollback if anything gets out of
line. That will be a hell of a neat trick.

-Ryan