On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 16:34 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > On 12/11/10 2:04 PM, Michael Miles wrote: > > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > >> On 12/11/10 1:13 PM, Michael Miles wrote: > >>> Considering that the LVM is a ext4 Virtual partition it seems to me > >>> that it would be easy to convert but there is no such beast out there > >>> Lots of stuff for converting ext3 to ext4 but nothing for what I need. > >> > >> This is pure speculation on my part, but I'm guessing one reason it's > >> hard is that the LVM layer knows nothing about the ext4 layer. The > >> ext4 layer contains lots of metadata (inodes, freelists, etc.) which > >> includes pointers to disk sectors or extents. In a physical partition > >> these point to real disk addresses but in an LVM partition they are > >> virtual (compare real with virtual memory for an analogy). From LVM's > >> viewpoint the entire ext4 fs is just disk sectors with random binary > >> data. The fact that some of this stuff is fs metadata and some isn't > >> means that a conversion tool would need to understand the ext4 > >> metadata to convert it. Of course if it's ext3 or xfs or btrfs etc. > >> then the same applies, with different rules for each one. > >> > >> Worse still, if you want a in-place conversion you have to be able to > >> do this in such a way that it's recoverable even after a hard system > >> crash in the middle of the conversion. And if you don't need it > >> in-place, you already have the solution as said before. > >> > >> Just my 2 cents. > >> > >> poc > > Agreed, I am just really surprised that Fedora would adopt this method > > of storage as it slows down the drive by a huge margin. > > That reason alone would say to me' No, don't want this" > > Perhaps there are other benchmarks with different results, I don't know. > In any case, Fedora presumably decided that the gain in flexibility was > worth it. The irony is that there *is* a considerable gain for people > with large systems, server farms, clusters and what have you. For the > ordinary desktop user it's much more open to question, particularly as > some tools (notably parted) don't support it. Case in point: my F13 LVM > layout suffered a number of changes during its life, basically because I > needed to expand / at the expense of /home. The upshot was that the LV > containg / was physically (but not logically) split in two > non-contiguous regions. Then I decided to expand the /boot partition, > which of course is not in LVM. This meant resizing /, freeing space at > the end of the disk and moving the physical partition where LVM lived, > but of course parted refused since it doesn't understand LVM. So you're opposed to LVM because you resizing physical partitions is a problem?? You lost me. As you point out, you have been able to resize and move things around easily with LVM. There's a lot of other advantages, but that should sell it for most desktop users. > I consulted Google, and this list, and a very knowledgeable friend, and > the LVM docs, and concluded that there was no avoiding messing with the > disk partition table via fdisk. Needless to say I lost everything. > Luckily I have a nightly backup to a NAS so the day was saved, and I > then got to do a completely clean install of F14. So maybe LVM is a Good > Thing after all :-) Right - using hard partitions limits you. Getting rid of the hard partitions is the goal. Once grub2 is the default boot manager for Fedora we no longer need a /boot in a separate partition and these problems are history. -- -- Best Regards Peter Larsen Wise words of the day: Fairlight: udp is the light margarine of tcp/ip transport protocols :) -- Seen on #Linux
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