Re: which is the best partition table format?
Once upon a time Derrick 'dman' Hudson said...
> On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 12:16:13AM +0000, Alan Chandler wrote:
> | On Friday 29 November 2002 7:19 pm, Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote:
> | > I just got a 20GB hard drive to add to my system. I'm familiar with
> | > the legacy DOS/Windows partition table and some of its limitations.
> | > Since I have no need to support a legacy OS, I am wondering what sort
> | > of partition table would be best to use. I intend to create a lot of
> | > little partitions on the disk and then use LVM to aggregate them as
> | > needed.
I didn't catch your original message, so I dont know how much more there
was to it than the above. I'll limit my comments to what I've quoted and
hope I'm not off on a tangent.
If you've going to use LVM, I dont see the point of creating lots of
little partitions and using LVM to glue them together. I suggest
creating one big partition and let LVM manage that.
eg. what I have is:
/dev/hda1: 100M root partition
/dev/hda2: 500M swap
/dev/hda3: 78G LVM partition (type 8e)
I dont put root in the LVM volume - it just seems safest to have a
simple root partition to make recovery easier.
Then, make /dev/hda3 a physical volume:
# pvcreate /dev/hda3
Create a volume group for the logical volumes:
# vgcreate vg0 /dev/hda3
Create logical volumes
# lvcreate --size 4G --name usr vg0
# lvcreate --size 2G --name var vg0
...
I've done this, but I still have a large amount of space not assigned to
any logical volumes. If I need to make a LV larger, use lvextend:
# lvextend --size +2G /dev/vg0/usr
Then use the appropriate tool to resize the filesystem (ext2resize for
ext2, xfs_growfs for xfs, etc).
If you want to add another drive to your system. eg. hdb:
# pvcreate /dev/hdb1 (or just /dev/hdb - no need to partition it at all)
# vgextend vg0 /dev/hdb1
... and then keep extending/creating logical volumes.
Now, to get back to you original question. If you were to adopt this
approach, I'd use the standard MSDOS partitioning scheme, mainly because
there are more tools to handle it. I dont see any other partitioning
format having any advantages if you use it as described above. There are
no more than three partitions on one disk, so they could be all primary
partitions, saving that tiny amout of space that extended partitions
use.
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