Fedora 15, new and exciting plans

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Sun Nov 14 22:46:08 UTC 2010


On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 01:07:28PM -0800, John Reiser wrote:
> On 11/14/2010 11:07 AM, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 10:38 -0800, John Reiser wrote:
> >> On 11/13/2010 03:41 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >>
> >>> Anyway, I think LVM is jolly useful:
> >> [stated advantages snipped]
> >>
> >> One design error is that you cannot "carve out" an ordinary partition
> >> from an LVM.  Once a portion of the drive is LVM, then that portion of
> >> the drive is LVM forever until the LVM is completely gone.
> > 
> > That's not true.  You can shrink the PV with pvresize and then create
> > any desired partitions in the resulting space.  Or did you mean
> > something different?
> 
> When I created 14 partitions using a DOS partition label
> (3 primaries, plus extended containing 10 logical partitions)
> and gave 6 of the partitions to an LVM setup,
> then I could not remove one of the partitions from the clutches
> of the LVM, and use the removed partition for some other purpose
> (keeping the rest of the LVM going), unless I removed all the LVM
> from that drive.

Quite probably the PV contained some allocated PE.  As another
respondant said, you can [manually, it is a little cumbersome with the
current tools] pvmove PEs around.

In any case I have no idea why you'd be using 14 partitions with MBR.
Really you should use GPT which resolves at least that shortcoming of
MBR.  MBR logical partitions are vulnerable to an error in a single
sector completely wiping out the chain of logical partitions.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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