> Just what are the main advantages to LVM over just a > plain jane ext2 (3) system? Is there a speed penalty > if you are not using RAID? Any thoughts would be > appreciated.... still updating the ole brain ROMs. Ric LVM gives you more flexibility. Essentially you take a disk partition and can then cut it up into logical volumes which you then place normal file systems on. This can allow you to expand, create and remove filesystems without having to touch the the disk partition table or worry about the location space on the physical disk. Consider this situation. You have a disk with three partitions: hda1, hda2, and hda3. You've sized them and created file systems as based on your best initial plans. As times moves along, you end up no longer needed hda1 -- whatever the function of it was is no longer a requirement/need for your system. During the same time, though, you've filled up hda3. In this situation, if you want to recover the space for hda1 and "add" it to hda3, you've got a good bit of work to do in moving hda2 around. Not a pleasant situation. With LVM, you would have made all of hda into a single PV and then a single VG. Within that VG you could have created 3 LVs (logical volumes) and put the filesystems on them. Then when you no longer needed stuff in the first file system, just unmount it and destroy that LV. Then you could expand the third LV and grow the filesystem on it (even can do it all online now without ever taking the box down). In the traditional volume example, hda2 sits in the middle of the space you want to use and makes things rather difficult. With a volume manager, the exact placement of things on the physical volume is abstracted and there is no issue. The ability to easily work with the volumes is also a plus. Hope that helped. Chris
