It's been a while since I touched LVM, I don't use it on my personal machines since I don't need what it provides and when it was first introduced in Fedora I found it slowed things down a bit.
Right now I'm changing my laptop to a 250GB SSD (from the 100GB it had previously). It dual boots and was a little tight for space (since just getting Win7 installed means about 40GB for the partition). What's there now is approximately: - windows c:\ 40GB NTFS - linux ~30GB ext4, / and /home - swap 2GB - /boot 500MB - shared NTFS remainder (~30GB, no, those don't quite match 100GB total) * normally on dual boot I put shared data on NTFS, FAT has too many problems (like file size, naming issues), and I don't really trust windows not to mess up ext4. There does seem to be a bit of a performance hit using NTFS from Linux, my desktop has various extra partitions for different things.
I'm thinking of adding most of the extra space to the shared partition, but also considering whether it's worth having a separate /home partition now there's a bit of space for it. But not certain in advance what the balance of those should be, so it'd be nice to be able to adjust it after the fact if needed, and I'm wondering what the most painless way of doing that will be. The nuclear option of course is take copies of everything, recreate those two partitions and then copy back on. Is there any less drastic approach?
On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
Is there any less drastic approach?
You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high- performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For most everything else it's fine.
poc
On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
Is there any less drastic approach?
You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high- performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For most everything else it's fine.
This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\ partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent access to a filesystem on the host machine.
On 01/06/2016 10:23 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
Is there any less drastic approach?
You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high- performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For most everything else it's fine.
This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\ partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent access to a filesystem on the host machine.
Referring to your original post, I don't really see a huge benefit to having separate / and /home partitions unless you're planning to do partition-based backups and restores. Back in the day when we backed up to tape and such with limited capacities, it made sense. Now that external hard drives are so prevalent and cost-effective, it doesn't track as well.
As to LVM, I like it from the standpoint that it is fairly easy to move things around if you want, and should you run out of space on your disk, you can add a second drive, make a PV out of it, add it to the VG your current LV is on, then grow your LV onto the new disk and expand the filesystem. For the vast majority of people, using LVM is really is somewhat "six of one, half dozen of the other". For people like me who do a lot of development or whose datasets are big (and my datasets just keep growing!), LVM (and the minor amount of care and feeding it requires) works well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@alldigital.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - grasshopotomus: A creature that can leap to tremendous heights... - - ...once. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
On 6 January 2016 at 18:33, Rick Stevens ricks@alldigital.com wrote:
On 01/06/2016 10:23 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
Is there any less drastic approach?
You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high- performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For most everything else it's fine.
This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\ partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent access to a filesystem on the host machine.
Referring to your original post, I don't really see a huge benefit to having separate / and /home partitions unless you're planning to do partition-based backups and restores. Back in the day when we backed up to tape and such with limited capacities, it made sense. Now that external hard drives are so prevalent and cost-effective, it doesn't track as well.
The thing I've found it most useful for is to keep data through a new Fedora install.
As to LVM, I like it from the standpoint that it is fairly easy to move things around if you want, and should you run out of space on your disk, you can add a second drive, make a PV out of it, add it to the VG your current LV is on, then grow your LV onto the new disk and expand the filesystem. For the vast majority of people, using LVM is really is somewhat "six of one, half dozen of the other". For people like me who do a lot of development or whose datasets are big (and my datasets just keep growing!), LVM (and the minor amount of care and feeding it requires) works well.
Yes, at work we use LVM to keep biggish datasets on, where it works well because we don't always know how big they're going to get. Not sure it will help here though, seems windows cannot see LVM partitions.
Rick Stevens:
Referring to your original post, I don't really see a huge benefit to having separate / and /home partitions unless you're planning to do partition-based backups and restores. Back in the day when we backed up to tape and such with limited capacities, it made sense. Now that external hard drives are so prevalent and cost-effective, it doesn't track as well.
Ian Malone:
The thing I've found it most useful for is to keep data through a new Fedora install.
Likewise... Back-up *and* restore is more time-intensive than just back-up and just use what's still there.
And I like the idea of someone else's: three partitions, one for the current installation, one reserved for the next release, and one for your data (used by both). Then, when you install the *next* release, your old one is held in reserve, and used for the next release install after the newest one. Leap-frog style.
I used to do that with separate drives, but since drives have become so huge these days, you can do it with partitions.
On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 06:23:55PM +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
Is there any less drastic approach?
You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high- performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For most everything else it's fine.
This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\ partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent access to a filesystem on the host machine.
To the latter point, I run Windows 8.1 as a VirtualBox VM under F22. The space for all my VM's is in a single LV with a ext4 filesystem. It can be resized as needed.
I don't know about other virtual environments, but under VBox, access to the Linux data is simple, called shared folders. Normally I make my F22 home dir available as a share (e: drive). This is one directory tree on an ext4 fs in an LV.
To try other combos today I shared /usr/local, the root of an ext4 fs again in an LV. I also shared /tmp, a memory based tempfs. Again, a simple "fill out a gui form of 5 items".
Jon
You could use LVM thin p for / and /home.
The advantage is LV sizes are virtual, and can be larger than the VG. So it's an on demand pool of extents, assigned when needed by whichever LV.
The installer won't let you over commit though. So what you do is create only / and set that volume size to a practical max. Post install create a new LV for /home and make it also a practical max size. The combined root and home can exceed the space in the VG.
The gotcha is if the actual combined used space in those two for systems exceeds the pool size. That'll break things.
But in the meantime it obviates filesystem resize. If you set to a practical max you won't need to grow an fs. And if you want to shrink, just use fstrim and unused extents will be returned to the pool. It's actually a lot more efficient and safe than fs resize.
Chris Murphy
Simpler is certainly no LVM, and single volume (combined root and home). And do directory based backup of home.
Gaming, probably need to dual boot. Otherwise use a VM. If you haven't tried it, GNOME Boxes is fast and easy to use for this. It's been included in live installs for some time, ready to go. And it supports a nifty express install for Windows.
Chris Murphy
On 01/06/2016 02:21 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
Simpler is certainly no LVM, and single volume (combined root and home). And do directory based backup of home.
Safest, however, is two partitions, without LVM: / and /home. That way, you can re-install from scratch if you have to without worrying about data loss, although it's always best, of course, to have a recent backup.
On 6 January 2016 at 22:14, Chris Murphy lists@colorremedies.com wrote:
You could use LVM thin p for / and /home.
The advantage is LV sizes are virtual, and can be larger than the VG. So it's an on demand pool of extents, assigned when needed by whichever LV.
The installer won't let you over commit though. So what you do is create only / and set that volume size to a practical max. Post install create a new LV for /home and make it also a practical max size. The combined root and home can exceed the space in the VG.
The gotcha is if the actual combined used space in those two for systems exceeds the pool size. That'll break things.
But in the meantime it obviates filesystem resize. If you set to a practical max you won't need to grow an fs. And if you want to shrink, just use fstrim and unused extents will be returned to the pool. It's actually a lot more efficient and safe than fs resize.
Thanks, that would be a nice solution if I could get it to play well with NTFS, on the other hand might be combined with the VBox shared folders Jon mentioned. Have always been a bit wary of over-provisioning for the reason you mention, but in my experience the / size is fairly stable once you've got the system set up as needed. (Still a few problems running a virtual machine for windows in this particular case of course, but I'm also interested in knowing what things are possible.)
On 6 January 2016 at 20:14, Jon LaBadie jonfu@jgcomp.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 06:23:55PM +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
I can only see the windows in a vm helping in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent access to a filesystem on the host machine.
To the latter point, I run Windows 8.1 as a VirtualBox VM under F22. The space for all my VM's is in a single LV with a ext4 filesystem. It can be resized as needed.
I don't know about other virtual environments, but under VBox, access to the Linux data is simple, called shared folders. Normally I make my F22 home dir available as a share (e: drive). This is one directory tree on an ext4 fs in an LV.
To try other combos today I shared /usr/local, the root of an ext4 fs again in an LV. I also shared /tmp, a memory based tempfs. Again, a simple "fill out a gui form of 5 items".
That sounds quite nice, I've only briefly used VirtualBox in the past, will have to give it another look. Could actually be useful for some other projects too.
First, I strongly recommend to put /home in a separated partition. It will save you time any time you make a fresh install. Second, may I ask what use you give to your Windows? I mean, why you keep a dual boot?
Cheers, Sylvia
On 6 January 2016 at 23:56, Sylvia Sánchez lailahfsf@gmail.com wrote:
First, I strongly recommend to put /home in a separated partition. It will save you time any time you make a fresh install.
Yes, it's how I've got my desktop set up, previously my laptop didn't have enough space to make that practical. Though USB sticks with impressive capacity are now cheap enough that you can just take a copy of /home and restore it afterwards.
Second, may I ask what use you give to your Windows? I mean, why you keep a dual boot?
Stuff. I like having tools around (which is why I usually run Linux...). Desktop, gaming and any streaming that doesn't work on Linux (there's only so much messing about with pipelight and making quesitonable SELinux changes I'll put up with), occasionally bits of audio software. Laptop similar, less often gaming, VM is maybe becoming more of a realistic option for what I use it for, but I don't find a dual boot much different in convenience (and of course there can be license issues) in exchange for being able to run on full hardware.
I disabled SELinux. It gets on my nerves. I've a dual boot in my laptop, but it's just for a warranty thing. It's squeezed in a 30GB partition. And for the next Fedora release it will be wiped. Glad you find a solution that suits you.
Cheers, Sylvia
-
Chris Murphy -
Ian Malone -
Joe Zeff -
Jon LaBadie -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Rick Stevens -
Sylvia Sánchez -
Tim