Re: Volume Managers in Linux

Florian Lohoff (flo@quit.mediaways.net)
Mon, 2 Nov 1998 23:56:19 +0100


On Mon, Nov 02, 1998 at 03:57:20PM -0600, Shawn Leas wrote:
>
> > Even the core developers seem to prefer other methods of
> > implementing e.g. resizeing -> ext2/3 etc.
>
> I believe you misunderstand the idea of LVM. It is definitively

I dont think so ... i am working on AIX whole day so i know the
concept of an LVM. It was just an example as you may read - Sure
it implements many more features.

> not a mechanism by which filesystems are resized. Rather, it
> provides a way to GRACEFULLY combine multiple physical volumes
> into a virtual contiguous logical volume, and gives a STANDARD
> interface to applying alocation policies and even RAID.

Yep - And even this Ted thought of beeing integrated into the ext234
filesystem

> I only put some words in CAPS because I KNOW somebody is gonna
> yell in my ear telling about MD. Well, MD isn't as clean as LVM,
> and I never thought it was graceful and definitely NOT standard.
>
> > Id like to see the LVM and an resizeable filesystem etc but
> > this seems not to be the way it will go.
>
> Having support for LVM in the kernel is so minimal it isn't
> even funny. It is userland to the hilt. The patch to kernel
> (ftp://ftp.msede.com/pub/linux/lvm/lvm-2.1-patch) is a grand
> total of 5k, and the rest is userland utilities and a SUPER
> handy lvm library.

I know these LVM implementation and talked to heinz on the Linux
Kongress ... but ...

> I see no bloat, only value added. Changes NOTHING for those
> who don't want it.
>
> Oh well, I guess even core developers can be sticks in the mud.
> Who would have guessed...

I also heard the speak of Ted about resizeable ext2 end future
whith holes in the fs etc, letting ext2 handle the multi-PHYSICAL-volume
things etc.

This obsoletes the LVM abstraction layer which i think is not "the unix way"
i think of it like doing everything with small functional "LEGO bricks"

BTW: If you read into the kernel mailing list archive we had this discussion
before.

Flo

-- 
Florian.Lohoff@mediaWays.net			+49-5241-80-7085
Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three). (RFC 1925)

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