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> Beso wrote:
>> second, i'd like to know if there's a need for a raid enabled
>> motherboard and more than one disk to go on lvm. i only have a 100gb
>> disk that i'd like to convert to lvm with no raid.

I recommend using software RAID unless you go all the way and get one of
those really fancy (expensive) RAID cards.  Honestly, software RAID has
some advantages over even the expensive setups, although a few
disadvantages as well.  I definitely wouldn't use the RAID built-into a
motherboard - it is effectively software RAID anyway and you're tossing
the flexibility of linux software RAID.

And LVM works fine without RAID - I've used it that way without issue at
all.  Of course, you have no protection so if you have a partition split
across two disks without RAID you lose data no matter which drive fails.

LVM is all about taking one pool of block devices and chopping it up
into a different pool of block devices - that's all.  You could run LVM2
on a floppy disk, on a USB drive, or whatever.  You could use LVM2 to
combine a floopy disk, an mp3-player, and a USB flash drive into a
single storage pool and then split it into a whole bunch of read-only
partitions.  It really has nothing to do with RAID other than the fact
that a RAID gives you one really big block device that is inconvenient
to use on its own.

One thing I haven't done is run boot/root on LVM2 - you might want to
look into that.  It might work with a initrd - I never bothered with
those so I keep it simple.  Besides, I keep little to nothing on my 1GB
root partition so it never fills up (root only contains /bin, /sbin,
/root, /lib, and /etc).


>> and last, does it make sense doing a passage to lvm? i currently run
>> into some problems with my root partition that gets filled and that i
>> always have to watch the free space on it, so if i don't pass to raid
>> i'll try to duplicate the partition on a greater one.

I'd recommend lvm for anybody doing anything at all.  It gives you a
whole lot more flexibility with your disk space.  If all your data is on
lvm and you want to add a raid later, or just add some new non-raid
drives, moving your data around becomes trivial (even with the system
running in full production).  Growing and shrinking partitions is
trivial as long as your filesystem supports it (I tend to use ext3 for
this reason - I don't think anything else supports both growing and
shrinking).

>> i was forgetting: i'd like to use it on amd64. is there any problem? i
>> have seen around some problems with lvm and amd64 some of them marked
>> as solved, so i'd like to know if there could be problems with this arch.
>> thanks for your help.

Maybe in the early dawns of time there were problems with lvm and amd64,
but I haven't experienced them.

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