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Description
At the moment the live CD allows you to manage the creation of partitions yourself before you install, or choose "everything in one partition". The alternate CD also has similar features, but also has the option of using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to make post-install partition management easier, and MD (Multi-Disk) to do software RAID based installs.
These (LVM & MD) should be incorporated into the live installer (Ubiquity) and further there should be an easy option for having a separate root (/) and home (/home) partition on installation.
There are a few significant benefits to this, not least of which is the ability to easily reinstall the OS (or install a different derivative or even different distro) without losing the valuable data in /home.
Other benefits include resilience (from MD), easy partition resizing (from LVM), and better space management, making it so that a full /home partition does not affect the system as a whole (as / would not be full).
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anzan wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 15:42
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Yes, this would be very useful.
We have over twenty computers on our LAN and the standard install moving forward is to have a separate /home folder. I hadn't thought about a separate root but that makes good sense.
Doing this "manually" is quite time-consuming and really should be default.
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Estesark wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 16:44
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Great idea, I'm strongly in favour of this. openSUSE gives you separate partitions for /home, /tmp, /swap, /boot and / by default, and something similar would make a lot of sense for Ubuntu.
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randomnote1 wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 23:57
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I'm not so sure about the LVM, but a separate /home directory would be very smart
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brunus wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 00:09
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This option should be ticked by default, and have a "recommended" tag.
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AaronPeterson wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 02:41
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I'm quite sure about LVM, but I'm not sure about having a seporate /HOME dir.
Many users don't know what's going to be on their systems, or how big things are going to be. I like to share items across all users, so I need a big /var directory -- isn't that a horrible name for common to most users of this computer?
/var/music
/var/videos
etc...
I don't want them in
/home/myusername/music
that's where my private stuff goes.
That said, what happens if I want to put a video clip or something that I don't want everybody to get to.. it goes in my home folder.. then the disk is full!?!!?!
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Estesark wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 03:02
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If your disk gets full, you can use LVM to resize the partitions. If your ENTIRE disk is full, that's neither LVM nor /home's fault.
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jeremy_bar wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 06:14
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I don't think the default should be to use LVM and partition the disk separating /, /home, /var ... by default. Of course, the user should be offered a manual partitioning option.
The reasons are:
o If /home and /var are separated by default, the user can waste disk space, or run out of it. There are no easy tools out there to resize Ext3 according to disk space usage, and without loosing data.
o Complexity, if you have a heavily partitioned system, the chances for failures are increased, especially through upgrades.
o Systems management becomes more complicated.
o The LVM also introduces one more layer of indirection and a software or hardware bug can cause more damage to the data.
o Partition tools like Acronis and Partition Magic can't deal with LVM partitions.
o Disk imaging software, such as Ghost, Acronis True Image or partimage can be confusing to use with a complicated partition schemes and don't work with LVM.
o The PC partition table gets complicated if using an "extended" partition, better only create primary partitions, as the meta data is kept in one place, in order to do this, the number is limited to 4, thus reducing the number of partitions.
o Rescuing data, imagine the hardware dies but the disk is OK, (typical if you lost the only NIC), with an LVM, you can't simply "mount" the partition if the disk is connected to an other system, you need to have the specific LVM tools installed and know the correct commands...
My conclusion is that the simplest partitioning scheme should be the default, letting the user customize his installation if necessary with LVM, MD and all the rest.
Jeremy
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supermike wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 06:37
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I agree. I've been using separate /home partitions for quite awhile and it makes for easier upgrades and for a safety card you can pull when you start to have bad blocks and fsck errors. In one case I was getting a lot of fsck errors on boot, so I booted anyway, backed up my /home with 'scp' to another Ubuntu workstation, used gparted to unmount and reformat /home, ran fsck to do bad block marking, and then restored my data. I could do much of this while the desktop was up because / was a separate partition.
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rduke15 wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 08:30
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I'm voting this down because I agree with jeremy_bar's objections.
I will change my mind if/when LVM becomes so widely supported that I can take a disk out of a dead system and be sure I will have immediate access to the data with all the usual tools (any popular Linux LiveCD, Acronis, Partition Magic, any recent Linux box, my Windows box with the IFS driver, etc.)
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zigzed wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 09:05
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I'm voting this down too.
I use linux for 4 or 5 years, and know little about LVM...
LVM is a great idea, but I'm worry about stability.
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herodiade wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 09:34
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Yes, all partitions should be wrapped in LVM group by default, at install.
Even if we don't have yet a clean Ubuntu GUI to make use of LVM cool features (like partitions resizing, hot snapshots, assigning a new disk to a saturated partition, ...), making use of LVM now is good provision, at no cost.
LVM is quite robust, and used by default in RHEL and Fedora since long (ie. was already installed by default in RHEL 4.6).
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sketec wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 10:15
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Making /home a separate partition is always a good idea. Should always be default.
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gs1104 wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 13:32
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Having an easy way to install a separate home directory would be a useful feature. You don't want it turned on by default because it's too difficult to adjust the balance between home and root if the user picks a bad split, you need to know what you're doing for this to be an improvement.
Linux LVM makes managing the disk more difficult for a typical user and last time I checked the performance of LVM was unacceptable compared to simple partitions. The management tools are less than impressive as well. As bad as partitioning is, at least that's a solved problem with no performance or reliability implications.
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pturing wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 15:37
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These things belong as optional, disabled by default.
LVM adds additional complexity, and means you can't do things you expect. For example:
You have 2 computers. You install Ubuntu on one, set it up with all your programs and settings, and then copy the disk to the other one. Something horrible happens and you can't boot #2, so you put the disk in computer #1. But now you can't see the second disk because it has the same volume group and id as the first one.
Same for separate home directory -- there is no since in giving users that don't know what a partition is 2+ partitions to manage.
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rawsausage wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 23:16
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LVM would enable also better root fs encryption (when you encrypt the root & swap etc that are in LVM volume you need the keys only once). It is really robust technology and other distros use it.
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pjhayward wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 23:34
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I am strongly opposed to LVM in general. I have used distros that assume you want LVM when they install, and invariably I have some sort of problem (bad kernel update, screwy initrd, whatever) resulting in an unbootable system. Fixing this requires a LOT of work on my part, and is only occasionally successful.
With that said, the recommendation to automatically create a separate /home partition is always a good one. But there are plenty of other Brainstorm ideas covering that base, so I'm voting this one down. I don't think LVM is generally a good idea. It just has too many possible points of failure. When it works, life is good (except for ugly volume ids - but that's what fs labels are for). When it doesn't work... Well, life ain't so good.
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schmichael wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 03:23
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-1
"by default" is wrong. KISS.
Being able to configure LVM, MD, etc. via the installer GUI would be nice to have as an option though.
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mbottrell wrote on the 10 Mar 08 at 09:41
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LVM has been around for years.
It makes adding additional disks, expanding partitions much easier.
It *DOES* work and it works well.
It's been in enterprise distros for years.
LVM _IS_ simple and makes disk administration pain-free.
Whilst 'by default' is probably not everyone's cup of tea, having it as an option on the default install (not the alt. CD) is probably prudent.
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Amos Shapira wrote on the 21 Mar 08 at 02:34
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To all those who voted this down just because they don't know LVM - please do your research!
LVM has been around for years and is used in many serious situations (critical servers, high-availability systems etc).
There are probably hundreds of thousands of installations of it churning data around the world as I write this.
I can't imagine being able to manage dozens of Xen images, multiple distributions, Linux/Windows mixes, fail-over, multiple disks united into larger volumes etc without having LVM around.
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bigredradio wrote on the 25 Mar 08 at 04:08
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I agree with the last two posts. There is a lot of trash talk and it is apparent that the posters have no idea what they are talking about. LVM for Linux was based on HP-UX's version of LVM. AIX is 100% LVM. Solaris uses the Solaris Volume Manager. All other unix-like OSs use volume management. Anyone from the UNIX world expects some type of volume managment. Using disk partitions is archaic.
I think a lot of this hesitancy is because new users are coming from Windows and want familiarity. Throwing everything into one filesystem may be "simple" for users, but introduces problems that were solved years ago with multiple filesystems.
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Vadim P. wrote on the 2 May 08 at 12:55
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Don't see why such an industrial-grade thing is needed on a normal desktop...
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drinkypoo wrote on the 9 May 08 at 15:24
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It's a mistake to do either of these by default.
Both make the system more complicated.
The only filesystem which AFAIK supports even close to all the LVM features is JFS. You can't shrink XFS for example. So if I need a bigger root (or usr or whatever) and I grew home to make room for some big temp files now I'm hosed on at least half the common filesystems.
Multiple filesystems is not the solution. If your system explodes when you run out of disk space then your system is stupid. This is why we save a percentage of the space for root, for logging. With a more intelligent trash can we could virtually eliminate this problem.
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