On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:50:03 +0200, Dale wrote about Re: [gentoo-user]
LVM for data drives but not the OS:

[snip]
>Ooooh.  Still some progress tho.  lol  So, if I was going to use LVM,
>I create a partition first, either whole drive or part of it then use
>LVM on that?

You use pvcreate to create a physical volume from the partition; this
formats the partition for LVM use, rather than for a filesystem. When
you have enough physical volumes on enough disks -- it's usually one
large PV per disk -- you then use vgcreate to amalgamate those physical
volumes into a volume group.  You can then use lvcreate to allocate
logical volumes within that volume group.

After that, you use mkfs to format each logical volume, as if it were a
partition.  You can then add them to /etc/fstab and mount them as
needed.

Note that the amalgamation of physical volumes into a volume group
allows you to do some neat things: you can "stripe" a logical volume
across multiple physical volumes to improve its I/O bandwidth; your
volume group is what DASD managers call a "concatenation set", which
means its effective size is the sum of the physical volume sizes, so
you can create a logical volume that is bigger than any of the physical
volumes involved.

But before you do any of that fancy stuff, get used to using LVM2 as a
smarter partition manager.
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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