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

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-10-25 at 16:24 -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:


> > First of all this has been known this whole time  Ric is not
> > bringing anything new to the table and I nack to this proposal it's
> > to dam late in the release cycle to change this now and if we change
> > this it means we have to slip another week to properly test anaconda
> > with lvm as default against the alpha and beta criteria 

> I am under the impression that we've been testing with/without LVM
> anyway, both scenarios? 

Sort of yes and sort of no. People have been testing LVM installs for
sure; we've had bugs filed and fixed on it. But we haven't been testing
LVM autopart in F18 because newUI doesn't actually let you; it doesn't
let you pick 'LVM autopart' or 'non-LVM autopart' as oldUI did. If you
do autopart you're stuck with raw ext4.

As I said, though, it's the same code we used for F17 and before that
all the way back to the storage rewrite, it was never taken out, so it
seems unlikely it'd suddenly be badly broken. And indeed I did a couple
of tests with the updates.img I put in the bug report and it seems to
work fine.

> In any case, it doesn't seem as earthshaking as other developments -
> it's just making the default be what it's been for some time, and
> given that there exists documentation for the "lvm enabled case" and
> not much otherwise it seems like a reasonable thing to do.  I would
> almost make the case that disabling LVM by default - were it a feature
> - would require a lot of that backup documentation and info that isn't
> really there....

Yeah, it's kind of a messy situation and you can argue it both
ways :( On the one hand it's absolutely true we shouldn't be screwing
about with the code at this point for Beta unless we really need to. On
the other hand, all you say about the 'change to raw ext4 by default'
really being the big change and it not having been properly proposed,
discussed and documented is true; and we can't really 'just push this
out to the next release' because once we do a stable release with raw
ext4 by default, the whole situation has been changed, and now going
back to LVM by default is the 'big change'. So it's really a bit of a
mess. :/
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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