Yesterday I installed a new machine ( with slackware-current if it matter ) and upgraded to a 2.6.1 kernel. Then installed from source device-mapper.1.00.07.tgz and LVM2.2.00.08.tgz I then defined two large partitions of type 0x8e on two different disk, ran pvcreate on both and make thems a volume group "vg01". I then created about 16 logicals volumes, formatted thems as reiserfs, added entry to fstab and mounted thems. Rebooted a couple of times meanwhile for unrelated purpose. I populated all the logical volumes (filesystems) with files. My problem start here. I then decided that I wanted a weekly snapshot of every filesystem (1Gig snapshot for every one) and typed the following command to create the first snapshot of /dev/vg01/www41 # lvcreate -s -L1G -n Swww41 /dev/vg01/www41 the command failed with some error on cmd 9 (or something like that) and also a fail in reloading the original www41 (or something like that) a "dmesg" told me that the kernel tryed to modprobe md-snapshot and failed (error 240 I think) a "lvscan" did show both the Original and Snapshot logical volumes as active. then I tryed to "lvremove" it, and it failed the same way, with the Snapshot still there. I then reviewed my kernel config and saw something related to "ioctl interface version 4" that was checked, I unchecked it for a test, recompiled the kernel and try "reboot" remotely but the machine never came back (but still ping at this time) so probably the machine never succeed to the "reboot" (hanged somewhere in shutdown and I guess it's related to the failing "lvcreate -s" earlier command but not sure) Well, then I looked at the device mapper source files to get clue on whatis dm-snapshot and saw some v2.4 patches creating a file of that name in the 2.4 source under drivers/md/ then I did a "ls -la /usr/src/linux-2.6.1/drivers/md" and got this: (it's on an other machine, the real one is still unreacheable) $ ls -la /usr/src/linux-2.6.1/drivers/md total 831 drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 1376 Jan 9 18:31 ./ drwxrwxr-x 43 root root 1168 Jan 9 18:32 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 204 Jan 9 18:31 .built-in.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9256 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-ioctl.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9018 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-linear.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 198 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-mod.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9018 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-stripe.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9060 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-table.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9018 Jan 9 18:31 .dm-target.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9006 Jan 9 18:31 .dm.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11568 Jan 9 18:31 .linear.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11922 Jan 9 18:31 .md.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11556 Jan 9 18:31 .raid0.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11556 Jan 9 18:31 .raid1.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11585 Jan 9 18:31 .raid5.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11607 Jan 9 18:31 .xor.o.cmd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5345 Jan 9 01:59 Kconfig -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 604 Jan 9 01:59 Makefile -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 129094 Jan 9 18:31 built-in.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23621 Jan 9 02:00 dm-ioctl-v1.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25845 Jan 9 01:59 dm-ioctl-v4.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 222 Jan 9 01:59 dm-ioctl.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15504 Jan 9 18:31 dm-ioctl.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2370 Jan 9 01:59 dm-linear.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2624 Jan 9 18:31 dm-linear.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 38953 Jan 9 18:31 dm-mod.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4977 Jan 9 01:59 dm-stripe.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3488 Jan 9 18:31 dm-stripe.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17959 Jan 9 02:00 dm-table.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8924 Jan 9 18:31 dm-table.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3017 Jan 9 02:00 dm-target.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4204 Jan 9 18:31 dm-target.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18787 Jan 9 01:59 dm.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4803 Jan 9 01:59 dm.h -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11288 Jan 9 18:31 dm.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7388 Jan 9 01:59 linear.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3988 Jan 9 18:31 linear.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 83758 Jan 9 01:59 md.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45144 Jan 9 18:31 md.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13314 Jan 9 01:59 multipath.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13165 Jan 9 01:59 raid0.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6852 Jan 9 18:31 raid0.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30264 Jan 9 01:59 raid1.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12416 Jan 9 18:31 raid1.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 48871 Jan 9 01:59 raid5.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17176 Jan 9 18:31 raid5.o -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3265 Jan 9 01:59 xor.c -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16320 Jan 9 18:31 xor.o There is nothing that look like "*snap*" in that directory. Apparently lvm2 "snapshot" is not working on out of the box on 2.6.1 kernel or I may have missed a step somewhere. (I'm used to lvm1 under 2.4 kernels) I would appreciate if someone can help me with this, I really want snapshot working. thanks, Christian. ps: is "ioctl interface version 4" required/suitable or not in the 2.6.1 kernel config ?