Re: partition table numberings

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>]

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On Monday 21 Mar 2005 2:52 pm, Urs Thuermann wrote:
> There is much better solution to your problem than grabbing a
> cigarette: It's called Logical Volume Management (LVM).  With LVM you
> can forget about partitioning completely.
>
> With LVM you would create one single partition covering the whole
> disk, setting the partition type to 0x8e (LVM), and create a so called
> volume group (VG) in that partition.  You can then build logical
> volumes (LV) in this volume group, which are normal block devices and
> which can be used for your file systems and swap spaces, just like you
> use normal partitions now.  One advantage of LVM is, that the space,
> that a logical volume covers, does not need to be contigous in the
> volume group.  The volume group's space is organized in fixed length
> blocks (something like 4MB or 32MB), so called physical extents (PE),
> and your logical volumes can use any number of these block in any
> order, as long as there available, i.e. not allocated to another
> logical volume.  There is mapping table that associates each block in
> the logical volume with the corresponding extent in the volume group.
> This is similar to paging in memory management.
>
> Since the extents of one logical volume do not need to be contigous,
> it's easy to resize a logical volume, i.e. allocate more extents or
> freeing extents to make them available for other logical volumes.
>
> Debian already contains everything you need to use LVM and it's easy
> to do for a new install.  For your existing system, you need to
>
> - back up all your data.
> - install kernel/modules for LVM, maybe an initrd if you want to / on
>   LVM, too (I do this for all my systems), and install LVM on your
>   disk.  The easiest way to do this may be to do a fresh install of
>   Debian (use dpkg --get-selections and --set-selections to keep your
>   package selection).
> - restore your data.
>
> This is some work but IMHO definitely pays off since you never again
> have to deal with partitioning when resizing your file systems and/or
> swap spaces.  If you buy a larger disk or a second disk, just create a
> volume group on it and add it to your volume group.  You can use the
> space all all disks in the volume group without worrying on which disk
> your data are placed (if you don't want to.  Of course, you can
> control if you need to).  If you want to remove one of your disks,
> just move all extents of that disk to the other disks (with only one
> command pvmove) and your done.
>
> LVM can make life *so much* easier when resizing, installing or
> deinstalling disks, etc.  Use it.

This is fabulous. But I don't think it's much feasible in case of a notebook 
and I posted the problem keeping my notebook in mind.
Will using LVM on a notebook, which will always have just one singe disk, give 
any benefit ?

I don't think so.

Thanks for your reply.

rrs
- -- 
Ritesh Raj Sarraf
RESEARCHUT -- http://www.researchut.com
"Stealing logic from one person is plagiarism, stealing from many is 
research".
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