[linux-lvm] [Fwd: boot from lvm volume]

Forwarded message from Michael Nittmann <[email protected]>

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: boot from lvm volume
Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 00:07:03 -0500
From: Michael Nittmann <[email protected]>
Organization: NCinc, Inc.
To: [email protected]

Is it yet possible to boot from an LVM volume?
A big advantage of LVM is the live resizing of volumes. Especially after
installing I would like to collapse / and have as many directories in fact as file systems on LVMs as possible.
The big advantage is a very fast recovery time, and also a quick change
of the kernel, e.g. keeping all /etc config files in place (production /etc/ mounted over sysgen /etc after sysgen/etc is merged into production /etc).
I like also mirrored / .

Is anyone working on a logical volume manager that supports Raid 1-5? (well, raid0 is the lvm itself, concatenation across physical media).

I am not on the list, please copy me in.

Thanks

Mike

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Hello,

AFAIK no. I use a small partition for the kernel, an initrd image and the lilo.conf which is later mounted as /boot.
So when the system is up the / filesystem is a logical volume and can be resized online like all the other filesystems I use.
Lilo boots the kernel from that partition, loads an initial ramdisk and executes the linuxrc script. In this script the needed modules are loaded (ide.o or the SCSI modules and the lvm module), the volume group is activated and by writing the major/minor number of the boot logical volume ( I use the first logical volume as the root LV ) to /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev the kernel will mount that one as the new root filesystem.
I use that for five different systems now. My plannings were to use the boot partition as a rescue system as well but I did it only on one system (proof of concept, but I found out that rescue floppies are enough for me).

Hmm, that would mean that the master boot record should be mirrored as well, otherwise you would loose your installed lilo. I haven't tried that yet.

Rolf

Rolf Jakob at home ([email protected])
WWW : http://www.franken.de/users/duffy1/rjakob (KDE-Utils and CCS)

Hello,

I'm very interested in using LVM for the root partitions (I use Redhat 6.2) as I can do with IBM AIX.

I would like to make a rootvg containing some LVs with /var /tmp /bin /usr /home for example, then make a datavg for SGBD, datas and so on.

As I plan to update my production system running 2.2.16 to 2.4.0 as soon this new kernel is available, I did some tests with the new kernel-2.4.0.test2 and lvm-0.8final patched. It seems to work perfectly but I was unable to find a way to put rootvg under LVM.

I understood that you use the initrd way to getting up your first VG but before that, how can you do to put /var /usr /sbin etc... under LVM. I mean, changing the filesystem tag (-> 0x8e) then creating PV, VG and LVs will distroy all datas on disk !!

Is there any way to create LVs before installing my RH distribution ?

Did I missed something ? Is there any documentation that could explain how to do this ?

NB: LVM is integrated into my kernel and is not a module.

Could you please help me on that subject ?

Thank you in advance,

PhiL

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Linux 2.2.16 | Philippe Lefevre E-mail: [email protected]   |  =�)   |
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