I would disagree there is little benefit to using lvm with a single disk, unless you only use it as a raid mechanism, which I don't.  Otherwise, I tend to compartmentalize my os for root, var, var/log, home, usr, and others, but occasionally I need to grow them over time, even adding another disparate disk to the system.  LVM lets me do this where I cannot with a base ext partition.  Also filling a bare root ext partition tends to fsck up the os royally, sometimes fsck is help in recovering, or not.  Never had this again switching to using lvm for everything.

Last time I built my laptop with arch, I was bent on using ZFS, but arch and maybe linux in general couldn't boot off an encrypted volume still.  BTRFS not sure currently, but it always seems a bit sketchy anyways.  Years later, I'd love to know if this works yet.

End of the day, I need 1) raid, 2) encryption, 3) volume management/scaling, and 4) ssd features to keep them alive.  I use only samsung disks that tend to do their own auto-leveling as I have found other SSD's entirely unreliable when layering said requirements currently with mdraid/luks/lvm/ext.  Samsung seems to nail it for longevity, though my laptop currently uses only a single toshiba m2 ssd and has been working fine for almost 5 years.  Maybe *other* vendors have finally copied them, but I simply don't even consider non-samsung drives these days.

ZFS seems the long-term ideal to replace mdraid/luks/lvm/ext all in one, maybe BTRFS, but curious if anyone's figured it out yet.  Probably wait for a new desktop/laptop to try this.

-mb

 

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 8:27 AM Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

Thanks Michael and Matt,

<scroll>

On 2021-05-27 17:33, Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> On 2021-05-26 17:32, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 2:24 PM Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss
>>> I am running a 250GB SSD. It will be entirely dedicated to the
>>> server.
>>> In reading the docs there is an option of using the entire disk for
>>> LVM
>>> and there will be two partitions, one for /boot and one for
>>> everything
>>> else.
>
> This is overkill unless you're going to be adding another disk at some
> point or constantly making and destroying LVs.  With a disk that
> small, it'd be totally fine to have an EFI partition of about 256M and
> a / partition taking up the rest of the space.
>
>> I run everything through LVM after about the second time I crashed my
>> root partition on plain ext2 by filling it entirely, at least probably
>> 10-12 years now.  LVM2 doesn't crash it like that even if filled, or
>> cause a full fsck of fscking time and other weird catastrophic
>
> ext3 was in the vanilla kernel in Nov. 2001 and rapidly became
> available and really well-tested.  SuSE was heavily pushing ReiserFS,
> so I was using that for a while, but I went ext3 in 2004 or 2005.
> ext2 in 2009?
>
>> I'd love to hear reasons not to use lvm, as it's dated,
>
> You hear "dated", I hear "has had a lot of people banging on it for a
> long time, so all the major and most of the minor bugs are fixed".
> The main reason not to use LVM is dual booting, as nothing but Linux
> can read LVM.  With things like laptops, where you've usually only got
> 1 disk, there's little benefit to LVM.

I am running a single disk for now.  I have two spinners however I
replaced them with an SSD.

I think the default install is LVM.

You say "where you've usually only got 1 disk, there's little benefit to
LVM."  Please expand on that a little more.

>
>> and looked at things like zfs and btrfs to replace 1)
>> raid, 2) encryption. and 3) logical volumes, but without these all
>> wasn't really an option.  Curious if anyone's using any one native
>> solution for all three yet.  Using mdraid+luks+lvm+ext4 is still my
>> general go-to.
>
> btrfs and zfs try to do too much in the same place and suffer for it.
> md has proven itself in the field, and LVM is filesystem-agnostic so
> if you want to run something other than ext4, you could.
>
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> But only Light too dim for us to see.
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