Chris Snook wrote:
John Priddy wrote:
So I would like to have rhel5 and fc9 coexisting on the same physical
disk. My questions/concerns are as follows:
1. Is there any issue with sharing the /boot mountpoint/partition
between both?
2. I haven't worked a lot with shuffling around VGs, but how about
sharing lvm volumes in general? If I create some generic (not root)
lvm volume and lay down an ext3 filesystem in FC9 should I expect any
problems when trying to mount the same in RHEL5? Is there any issue I
should be aware of regarding differing versions of lvm? Is it worth
while/possible to share the swap volume -- lets say I put the computer
into hibernate in FC9, then later on I boot up into RHEL5, whats the
worst thats going to happen?
3. Anyone else out there doing something like this that has any
additional advice?
Thanks
John
It works, but it can be a pain in the ass. Personally, I prefer to have
separate /boot partitions, and chainload them from the first one, which
holds the oldest distro. That way, if a new distro adds features that
are incompatible with an older bootloader, each OS is still being loaded
by its own bootloader. The only catch is that you have to be careful
and make sure that when installing the non-primary distros that you put
the bootloader on the /boot partition, not on the MBR.
Anaconda makes it very easy to create a chainload entry pointing to
another partition. I usually leave a few GB of space free so I can
create extra /boot partitions at will, and put all the rest in LVM.
-- Chris
I realized I didn't really directly answer questions #1 and #2.
1) I can't think of any specifically for RHEL5/F9, but I've had problems sharing
/boot between distros in the past. The nastiest one is dual-booting x86_32 and
x86_64 when the distros don't include the arch in the kernel and initrd
filenames. Might as well set yourself up for chainloading now, so you don't
have to worry about these sorts of problems if you decide to add a distro that
has such a problem.
2) Anything needed to boot the system should probably not be shared. Sharing
/home is fine and even encouraged. The system will actually set itself up to
share swap automatically unless you tell it not to, which could cause
hibernation problems. You can rectify that by forcing each distro to use a
distinct swap partition, and check /etc/fstab post-install to make sure it
didn't auto-add the other one. If you're not doing hibernation, sharing swap is
perfectly fine.
As for LVM versions, anything running a 2.6 kernel will use LVM2 and be
compatible, so you won't have problems unless you try to share with a very old
distro. Just put it all in one VG for simplicity.
-- Chris
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