Hi! I recently had a big slow-down in boot time. At first I assumed it was one of the updates, but I am pretty sure now it was due to lvm and the fact that I left music/vcds in the dvd drives. The delay was between mounting the root partition and the swap space; looking at /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit I figured it was due to lvm (logical volume management), whatever that is. In var/log/messages, there were errors from the cd drives, sometimes few (2 each) and sometimes many (corresponding to long delays in booting, so long that at first I always assumed it was hung and did a hard reboot). Setting up verbose logging for lvm yielded ``no volume groups found'' so i figured it wasn't doing anything and I disabled it by renaming /sbin/lvm.static to /sbin/lvm.static.bk. Then booting has been fast and the /dev/hda and /dev/hdb errors from the cd drives disappeared. All of this is good so far, but I want to ask to make sure that lvm isn't something I will need later and do not want to disable. Also, out of curiosity, what is lvm and when is it needed? The references to lvm on this list only say that if you use lvm, you should not even think about using yum or apt to upgrade from FC1 to FC2.
