Re: Buster: problem changing partition size on a RAID 5 array

[Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net>]

On 16/08/17 01:48 PM, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:

On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 2:47 PM, Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net> wrote:

The reason its rare is more likely that Linux hasn't been able to boot from mdadm partitions until recently.

IIRC it's been available in Debian since lenny in 2009. But yes, if you began using linux in, say, 1994 or so,

that's "recently".... ;-)

Well, I've been using Debian since Potato but before that I was using other distributions so yes, I do go back a ways. However being able to boot from a RAID 5 partition isn't the same as being able to boot from a partition on a RAID 5 array.  I believe you could do the former at least one version before you could do the latter.

 

I'm one of those people who see little value in LVM. It just adds complexity without doing anything that a little planning could usually avoid. Of course, I'm not running a large datacentre with the need to frequently reallocate disk space on the fly...

It's hard to overstate just how much flexibility LVM brings to the table in the day job. And if you've done any AIX work, it's basically a port of AIX's LVM, so you already know it. Frankly I use it at home now too, disks are big these days. AND (pet peeve...) you don't need to partition beneath it anymore. 

LVM to me is more like a solution looking for a problem. Back when disk space was at a premium, the ability to reallocate it was important. However these days it's often easier to just to throw more hardware at it. It seems to me also that BTRFS makes LVM obsolete, so that I may have successfully avoided learning a technology that I will never need - assuming BTRFS ever gets optimized enough to compete with Ext file systems.

Obviously my use cases aren't the same as yours. You find that LVM solves problems for you. I have yet to encounter a situation where I said "I wish I'd installed LVM".