On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 09:43:27AM -0500, Yanick Quirion wrote: > I want to implement LVM on a new system. Currently Fedora comes with utilities > of LVM version 1.0.x. I also read some stuff about LVM2, but I can't figure out > which one is the best solution. On a old system I use LVM 1.1RC2, but this > version seems now to be unavailable. LVM1 in Fedora works seems to work. I have it installed on my laptop. If you want to play with the 2.6 kernel, you are going to need to get LVM2 working. Also, the performance of LVM1 snapshots on 2.4 is pretty awful, and drags the whole system down. LVM2 offers on-disk compatibility with LVM1, but also offers a new, incompatible, and far-superior meta-data format that is human-readable and less prone to corruption. But currently, using device-mapper / LVM2 involves a bit of work. I haven't looked at whether the current Fedora kernel is fully patched up with the latest device-mapper patches from Joe Thornber. If not, you ought to get the latest patches from: http://people.sistina.com/~thornber/patches/2.4-stable/ Initial builds of device-mapper and LVM2 rpms just appeared in the Fedora development tree. As these are intended for FC2, it doesn't appear that there is any package compatibility features to play nicely with LVM1. (At the most basic level, the man pages in the lvm2 package conflict with those in the lvm package.) Currently, this is fine if you are just going to use LVM on a spare disk. Luca Berra's Mandrake packages, http://percy.comedia.it/~bluca/cooker/lvm2/ use the /etc/alternatives mechanism to allow LVM1 and LVM2 to coexist. You might consider merging his .spec file with the Red Hat package if you want to keep LVM1 and LVM2 installed. If you want to use LVM2 for system partitions like /, /usr, /var, additional work is required. You will need to fix rc.sysinit to work with LVM2, and you will need to construct an initrd with the appropriate tools, as current mkinitrd doesn't support LVM2. This is further complicated by the fact that there is no staticly built version of the LVM2 tool for use in initrds. Back in January 2003 I had done some minimal work to allow LVM1 and LVM2 to coexist (by packaging lvm2, repackaging lvm1, updating mkinitrd and initscripts, etc.), but haven't had time to merge my patches back with upstream changes. I'm going to try and get to that some time in the next month. At this point, it is easier to just drop support for LVM1 and go to using LVM2 with the new meta-data format for both 2.4 and 2.6. What one loses is the ability to use rescue disks, etc., that only have LVM1. Regards, Bill Rugolsky
