The Mess That is Linux Volume Management
The GNU/Linux operating system is blessed to have sound partition management tools like GParted which are very easy to use. However, when it comes to the management of 'virtual partitions' known as volumes, things are quite different. There is Linx Volume Management, or LVM in short, however, it can almost only be used from the command line. Also, it doesn't integrate software RAID - except for striping. I was quite optimistic when I started using volume management some four years ago, but not anymore. Let me explain why I'm disappointed.
The problem
It all started when I installed Gentoo for the first time. Or actually, my friend did it for me - since it was more difficult than installing OpenBSD, as the latter can be done in two minutes. After Slackware, it was the second Linux distribution to touch the platters of my harddrive. I was quite used to the rather rigid partition schemes of OpenBSD, in which /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt and /home all have their own partitions. Not being experienced at all, I remember I thought "1GB must be enough for /usr" only to find out it wasn't if I installed a lot of applications. Normally, such a thing would require re-installation of the OS if it was too difficult to re-partition the disk without losing data.
That's when my friend said to me: "You know, in Linux there's some way to prevent this kind of problem, by using a system in which you can dynamically resize partitions without even having to reboot your computer!".
The solution
That's when I learned about LVM, and I immediately wanted to try it. I was encouraged when I found a guide how to install Gentoo on an LVM-system. I found out the most important thing to make LVM work was the device mapper. The device mapper makes virtual block devices; which basically means virtual partitions. On this virtual partitions, one can put a filesystem and mount that filesystem to use it. Or - and that's what makes Linux volume management so flexible - one can put another virtual partition on a virtual partition, in other words layer the virtual devices. Using LVM wasn't really hard: I just typed over the commands given in the HOWTO while changing some parameters to my liking, and in a short amount of time, Gentoo booted using my new LVM environment. However, because I was using LVM1 back then, my system wouldn't boot at first. Running lvchange -a y when the boot halted halfway cured this.
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