pvdisplay -m

is "pvdisplay -m" still unimplemented?

After I turned to a hardware raid5 system my PVs become quite HUGE (about 2-4 TB each!). This huge PVs easily get fragmented. If I want to pvmove some LV it often does not work by default. The huge PV has space to hold the additional LV, but it is not contiguous, and "--alloc anywhere" won't split a contiguous chunk to fit into smaller gaps. (and the algorithm to do so is not trivial, even if it sounds easy).

So I frequently end up with a desk calculator to analyze my /etc/lvm/backup/ metadata to extract a list of occupied and free ranges on my PV to express pvmove commands with explicit PE ranges.

To make this easier, I would propose the following extensions:

Some command/option to print out the layout of a PV including the free gaps.

Extend the --units option to display LE counts. (one could use "e", but I don't know, how long it takes until we need to express sizes as exabytes :-)

Express LE ranges by a "+" like /dev/sda:1000+500 as a shortcut for /dev/sda:1000-1499.

btw: is there a more detailed description about how pvmove exactly behaves when giving multiple source and/or target ranges? --> can I explicitly express the splitting of source chunks into target fragments by a single pvmove command?

If someone agrees that this is useful, I may start trying to implement this and propose some patches.

Dieter.