You will want to make sure Multi device support (RAID and LVM) is enabled and LVM support is compiled into your kernel. You could build it as a module and load it from your initrd, but you don't really need to go to the effort.
You have a 36gb disc (this might be a RAID logical volume already, but the system sees it as one disc with 36gb on it). You want to install partitions for /usr, /var etc (smart) but you're not sure what sizes they need to be and you will want to be able to resize them in future.
At install time, create a small (<100mb) /boot, swap, and a reasonable (4-6gb) / partition. Leave the rest of the space unpartitioned.
Make sure LVM is compiled into your kernel, and you have the LVM tools installed (Debian: apt-get install lvm10).
Set the type of this partition (which, in my case, is primary partition 4 and eats the rest of my disc) to 8e - Linux LVM.
vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...) vgscan -- "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d" successfully created vgscan -- WARNING: This program does not do a VGDA backup of your volume group
This creates a volume group descriptor area (VGDA) at the start of the disks.
pvcreate -- physical volume "/dev/sda4" successfully created
This volume group can contain multiple discs, but in this case it only uses one.
vgcreate -- INFO: using default physical extent size 4 MB vgcreate -- INFO: maximum logical volume size is 255.99 Gigabyte vgcreate -- doing automatic backup of volume group "lvmarray" vgcreate -- volume group "lvmarray" successfully created and activated
- vgdisplay
Confirm that the VG size is the right amount for the size of the partition.
Note that if you use devfs, you'll need to use the full devfs pathname, not the /dev/sda4 symlink. EG:, use /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4 instead of /dev/hda4
lvcreate -- doing automatic backup of "lvmarray" lvcreate -- logical volume "/dev/lvmarray/home" successfully created
- lvcreate -L5G -nvar lvmarray
lvcreate -- doing automatic backup of "lvmarray" lvcreate -- logical volume "/dev/lvmarray/var" successfully created
- lvcreate -L5G -nusr lvmarray
lvcreate -- only 793 free physical extents in volume group "lvmarray"
- lvcreate -L793 -nusr lvmarray
lvcreate -- rounding size up to physical extent boundary lvcreate -- doing automatic backup of "lvmarray" lvcreate -- logical volume "/dev/lvmarray/usr" successfully created
(Now would be a good time to learn about label based mounting!)
mount /dev/lvmarray/home /home
You will of course want to move everything from /home first, and add them to fstab(5) etc... To move your partitions, you'll probably want to be in runlevel 1.
Oops! Just created 20g /home, 5gb /var and 860mb /usr. So lets take 4gb from home and add it to usr.
e2fsadm is a utility that comes with LVM that lets you automatically fsck, resize FS and then resize LV.
You need to have e2fsprogs installed for this to work (but you probably needed it to make the FS to start with.) When the time comes to learn to resize LVM partitions, there'll be more. Until then, see http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO
1? PV: Physical Volume; a disc or a partition on a disc. 2? VG: Volume Group; a group of one-or-more physical volumes across which you get a "virtual disk", a space to create logical volumes in. 3? LV: Logical Volume; something you eventually create an FS on.
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