Convert ext4 lvm to normal ext4 partition

Michael Miles mmamiga6 at gmail.com
Sat Nov 13 00:01:29 UTC 2010


Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Friday, November 12, 2010 01:34:09 pm Michael Miles wrote:
>    
>> Agreed, I am just really surprised that Fedora would adopt this method
>> of storage as it slows down the drive by a huge margin.
>> That reason alone would say to me' No, don't want this"
>>      
> I'm curious as to what sort of performance issue you might be seeing, as I've done some benchmarks comparing LVM to raw disk before, and LVM is competetive in terms of performance in all the benchmarks I've run (I primarily use bonnie++, which is in Fedora, for this).  LVM certainly gives you lots of flexibility afterwards, however, that a straight partition won't have.
>
> And that brings up your original question.  How can you resize /boot?
>
> Now, it is possible to resize /boot using the Ext4 resizer, the LVM tools (specifically: lvresize, pvresize, pvmove, and friends)  and very careful use of fdisk, without the loss of data, as long as you have over 50% free space on the disk.  However, it is quite a bit easier to backup your data, reformat, and restore.  And it is likely to be faster; the only advantage to the LVM method is that you can do it with the system on-line.  The LVM method would require two pvmoves.
>
> To see part of the details of what this would look like, see: http://fedorasolved.org/Members/zcat/shrink-lvm-for-new-partition
>
> Especially if you're not extremely familiar with the operation of LVM in this scenario.  I have done similar, where I migrated the / filesystem from a single disk to a RAID6 set without data loss and while the system was live, but it required a lot of thought, careful planning, and lots of reading beforehand to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.
>
> You could use a similar procedure to convert your disk to not using LVM (short version: reduce the LVM size, make a new partition large enough to contain all the data, clone the filesystem to the new partition, blow away LVM, make a new swap partition, resize the main data partition with gparted, all from a LiveCD of course), but, there again, backup/reformat/restore is probably quicker, and it is the only option if you have less than 50% free.
>
> It will be nice when gparted and similar tools get full LVM support; and, for all I know, some commercial tool out there has it already.
>
>    
Thank you very much for this. I will give it a go and see

After I back everything up ....


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