On Dec 18, 2013, at 8:50 AM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This makes even less sense for a laptop, but lets look at a desktop 
> situation. Sure you could add a second disk, add it to your volume group, add 
> space to your LV, and resize your filesystem to use it. One problem though, 
> you've created another point of failure for your FS (two disks) without 
> getting anything in exchange.

Yes, I agree it's a problem short of a way to mitigate the (inevitable) failure 
of one of the disks and hence any file system that uses all or part of a failed 
PV.

> It's not striped (you can do LV striping, but that's another discussion 
> altogether), it's not mirrored, there's no parity. So why do it?

pvmove is a pretty cool way to move every LV, online, to a new PV. But I agree 
LVM is overly complicated for such hypothetical benefits. Benefits that assume 
more knowledge on the part of the typical user than is true. It's much simpler 
to just backup, and restore to a new bigger disk, than to learn various LVM 
commands.

For what it's worth, LVM2 supports its own raid0, 1, 5 and 6. Those raid levels 
are LV attributes. So instead of configuring different raid levels by using 
disk partitions, and the ensuing near impossibility (or madness) of resizing 
them should it be needed, this can be done on a per LV basis from a single VG. 
It's "simpler" in that there's one less layer to deal with, however it means 
learning totally new vernacular and monitoring methods which itself isn't 
exactly simple.

> In a server/enterprise setting I think it makes a lot more sense where you're 
> likely to need to use LVM to span across multiple raid arrays, SANs, etc.

I think LVM is pretty bad ass.  During F18 pre-release, the installer team had 
moved to Standard Partition scheme (all ext4) by default. But for the very 
reasons you mention, I was opposed to LVM by default redux, but the LVM camp 
won that argument somehow.

Another place it makes some sense is full disk encryption (i.e. not just home), 
where the PV/VG is encrypted, and then the LVs are drawn from that. That's 
simpler than separately encrypting partitions for /home and /. Assuming you 
want /home separate.

Honestly a lot of these things get easier with Btrfs due to yet another loss of 
a separate layer. It's as simple to use as a plain file system without thinking 
of esoteric features if you don't want, but they're there should you need them: 
compression, much safer fs resize shrink or grow, partitioning without having 
to specify sizes, functional equivalent to pvmove, and even the ability to 
migrate specific "partitions" like /home to another disk, multiple device 
support, and of course snapshots. Plus it's also friendlier to SSD than other 
options.

Chris Murphy
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