http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/34/
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).

[476 votes] Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #34


[4 votes] Solution #2: Integrate Fedora's partitioner


[55 votes] Solution #3: Make it more obvious that you need alternate ISO for an upgrade


[21 votes] Solution #5: Provide an install DVD that is big enough to contain Live and Upgrade distribs.


[3 votes] Solution #6: Option to export my update needs to download it on a computer with internet


]]> en-us Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:11:25 +0000 Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:14:20 +0000 QAPoll module http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/34/
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.]]> Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:42:27 +0000 Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:44:35 +0000 Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:57:17 +0000 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:09:40 +0000
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!?!!?!


]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:41:00 +0000 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:02:25 +0000
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]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:14:26 +0000 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:37:18 +0000
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.)
]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:30:51 +0000
I use linux for 4 or 5 years, and know little about LVM...

LVM is a great idea, but I'm worry about stability.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:05:01 +0000
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).
]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:34:04 +0000 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:15:10 +0000
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.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:32:24 +0000 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.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:37:16 +0000 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:16:14 +0000
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.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:34:30 +0000
"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.]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:23:23 +0000
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.]]> Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:41:51 +0000
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.
]]> Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:34:54 +0000
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.

]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:08:41 +0000 Fri, 02 May 2008 12:55:24 +0000 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.]]> Fri, 09 May 2008 15:24:09 +0000 Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:26:27 +0000
However, I'm voting this up, since it would solve a more fundamental problem. The current live CD does not include the LVM packages, so a network connection is necessary for any recovery if you have used LVM to hold your root partition.

]]> Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:20:16 +0000
Reading the comments though i reconsidered and I think the best solution is NOT to apply BY DEFAULT. There should be an option on the GUI installer that clearle states the benefits of using LVM.]]> Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:34:12 +0000 Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:14:20 +0000