interesting facts about LVM:

1. You can make a volume snapshot of the system before a major change (for example, an update).

2. You can enable caching and use HDD together with SSD cache

3. You can build raid 0,1,5 directly on LVM (you still need modules from mdraid)

4. Even without a raid, you can expand the partition beyond one disk to another or migrate the partition from disk to disk (without even disabling it)

However, all this is done from the console and I do not know if there is a GUI.

Something that LVM supports but ZFS and BTRFS don’t, is the ability to reduce your storage. (That is, to empty and remove a drive from the array, without having to completely destroy the storage array.) As a home user without sufficient storage to have complete duplicates of everything, I find this an important feature.

LVM is just a way more flexible partition table. It gives you the possibility to grow partitions at a later date. You probably not think you can do that with MBR or GPT too. Well yes, but only when the spare room is adjacent to the partition you want to grow. With LVM you can grow partitions even if the free space is somewhere else on the disk.

So you can grow any disk ‘partition’ at any time as long as you have some free space in the group.

Another advantage is that you can encrypt logical volumes easily. Usually that’s supported when you install the OS.

You can also stack LVM on top of a software RAID, so you can create a mdadm from a disk partition of several disks and create a VG on that with LVs to spilt it into pieces.

I usually use LVM on every server. There is no need not to and gives you options for the future.

LVM is a bit more complicated than just using a normal partition, but it does add a lot of functionality. If you need to make an LVM volume bigger, you can just add another disk to the volume. You can also do RAID like stuff with it. Live resizing of volumes is doable too.

I think some LVM stuff can be done in Disks, but I generally just use the command line. Smarter people, are there graphical LVM utilities I don't know about?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

[Thread #309 for this sub, first seen 28th Nov 2023, 23:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

can you stack btrfs on top of LVM? is there any advantage of doing so?

right now i have each docker volume mapped to a btrfs volume, so that i can snapshot the volume and send it away.

can i replicate the same thing with LVM and ext4 for example?

i'm mostly interested in the ssd as cache feature and the possibility of just adding more disks. Stuffs that are not possible in my current setup.

Slightly off tangent, but if you are thinking you might need LVM features (other than disk encryption) then it is worth looking into filesystems that have most of the functionality built in, like btrfs or OpenZFS.

Just move to BTRFS and enjoy it all without LVM.