Importance of LVM (was Re: Partitioning criteria revision proposal)

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-10-16 at 17:55 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> BTW, on the topic of LVM specifically (whose importance we still haven't
> really established): I did some archive-diving last week. We first went
> to LVM-by-default all the way back in Fedora Core 3. There were two
> reasons for doing this. The 'official' one was to make it easier to
> expand the capacity of a system simply by adding another hard disk. The
> less official reason was to get more testing of LVM, which was still in
> its infancy at the time. Ever since then, we've stuck with the default
> really just because it's always been there; until I started poking into
> it, no-one really had a story for why LVM was default any more.
> 
> Neither reason really applies much any more. LVM is much more mature
> now, and in a way is yesterday's news, the Glorious Future maybe belongs
> to btrfs. And we've finally hit the point in history where most people
> don't run out of space on the hard disk that comes with their system,
> and even when they _do_ run out of space, it's usually not with OS data
> but with 'user data' that is much easier to spread across multiple disks
> without using LVM. So I'm not sure we really have a convincing reason
> any more to care especially about LVM.

On this topic...Ric Wheeler came up with some fairly good arguments in
favour of keeping the LVM default and proposed it on the anaconda list
this morning (actually I think the post may not have been approved yet,
but it'll show up soon). Since we're post-freeze now I summarized the
debate into a bug report and nominated it for NTH:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=870207

I think it's still true to say that our *original* reasons for
defaulting to LVM don't really hold any more, but Ric made some pretty
decent *current* arguments for keeping that default until we switch to
btrfs-by-default.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net