CentOS and LVM partitions

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
> CentOS is wanting to install the /boot partition on a primary partition
> and the rest of the partitions on an LVM partition.

Yep.  If it were possible to have /boot on LVM, it's probably want to do that 
too.

> fdisk -l then only lists two partitions. One needs to know to put
> subsequent boot partitions as primary or extended rather than LVM.

Why would you need more than one /boot ?  AFAICT, a 100M /boot can hold every 
kernel image, initrd, and grub.conf for 10 different distros.  Typically, you 
don't have that many on one machine, but EPID.

> It also becomes not so easy to debug partition issues because you can't
> see them through normal mechanisms.

Most RescueCDs now support LVM2.

> Anybody have an opinion on using LVM partitions?

LVM is great if A) you've read the LVM-HOWTO and understand it B) you don't 
need to read or write the disks on a non-Linux machine.

A is important because there are a number of gotchas with the 
PV/VG/LV/filesystem resizing that are not immediately obvious.  And it's 
*much* easier to expand PVs, VGs, LVs, and filesystems than it is to shrink 
them, so don't make 99% of the disk a PV unless you are sure you won't need 
any normal partitions.  And make sure you've made your ext3 filesystems with 
reserved blocks in the GDT if you ever plan on expanding them!  Check it with 
mke2fs -n first; older versions of e2fsprogs didn't allocate spare GDT space 
unless you told them to.

B is important because right now, nothing but Linux can grok LVM.  This is why 
my laptop doesn't use LVM; occasionally I have to run 'Doze for work.  

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