LVM / resizing option during install....

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Gaytan

LVM / resizing option during install....

Post by Gaytan »

Hi again,

Got a question / dilemma about the ability to choose for LVM during installation.

During installation the kind question is asked if you're interested (here graphic screen) in resizing your partition(s) later (eventually), which can be answered swiftly by 'ticking' the box to use LVM.
What is not told, that resizing of partition(s) later on takes a lot of terminal command, procedures etc, to actually resize partitions. I would have taught that just resizing by means of eg GParted, would be enough but appearantly this goes way further....

When ticking a box (graphically) like LVM during boot, that gave me the impression I would find back a graphical tool with gui that would enable me to resize my partitions..... If resizing is such dangeours, procedural work, isn't it better to leave it out during installation? I think it gives the wrong impression to noobs and medium users like myself, this can easily be performed afterwards.....

Greetz!
:D
houninym

Re: LVM / resizing option during install....

Post by houninym »

Hi, joined this forum to raise this observation also!

The install process offers the choice of 'wipe the disk' or 'something else' as radio buttons and within 'wipe the disk' you have the options to use LVM and encrypt (I'm doing this from memory having just had to reinstall Mint 18.3 (Cinnamon / 64-bit) due to some stupidity so the names of the buttons may not be right).

'Something else' doesn't offer the option to use LVM at all!

If you select 'LVM' you end up with a disk with a sub-500Mb /boot on /dev/sda1 and the rest of the disk as an LVM volume group built on /dev/sda5. This has got a swap LV that is apparently 1xRAM and the rest is created as /.

This is less than optimum. It's got all the disk allocated to / (which is arguably better than RedHat/Centos default which puts 50Gb in / and the rest in /home)... and it's got what I consider to be an unnecessarily small /boot on modern disk hardware. Reworking this to create a sensible layout from this position is an unnecessarily complex procedure! Effectively, to get the layout I'd prefer I need to back up the files, recreate the disk from a live image booted off USB and copy the files back again... or spend more effort faffing with (g)parted off a live image to move partitions around.

Why can't the 'something else' allow the user to create a logical volume structure? Harping back to other distributions, it's possible in the equivalent of 'something else' to create a custom sized /boot partition and an LVM partition containing customised mount points. Or a whole-disk LVM with a /boot LV in it and anything else you want to put in by way of mount points. Or use less than the whole disk in case you want to do something more exotic like leave space to configure an MD mirror of the LVM partition within one disk. How to do that during the install is something that is available in other non-copyright distributions... and it's not beyond even occasional installers to find their way round this.

From lots of experiencing administering Linux in a variety of commercial environment, a small /boot is a frequent cause of system issues... it can't hold many versions of the kernel and on a system that self-updates and runs out of space in /boot (and doesn't alert the administrators) you can end up with a badly compromised system. It might be OK for the life of a non-LTS system but not for an LTS system that is regularly patched. 500Mb is 0.1% of a reasonable mechanical hard disk and less than 0.5% of a reasonable SSD and I'd like the option to change this while using LVM!
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