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Dear Linux-based lazyweb, I have an LVM request…

So I have four harddisks on this box, five (or six if we count physical drives) with the external one that is mostly used by my MacBookPro but is empty for more than half, and I might as well put to use for some storage, if I find a way to get HFS+ to work nicely on Linux.

Most of the space in these four disks is handled through LVM (I have a swap partition — which is probably silly since I have 16GB of RAM on this box — and the /home partition in software RAID6, as well as /), which is perfectly fine, as I can extend partitions where I need space (I rarely had to extend /usr and after installing the system is basically done, I had to expand /var or the partitions I use for VMs, chroots and similar many times). The drives are not all new, two are from a few years ago (with 3 and 2 MB unusable in each) and two from last year (less than 1MB unusable); if I get a decent job by the end of the year I might get to add a couple more drives to it.

Now, what I’m worried about is the load on the drives, since I’m leaving Yamato to build and rebuild packages so I can test them and file bugs when needed. Do anybody know a way to redistribute the load of extents between different drives?

Thanks a lot to anybody who has ideas!

Comments 6
  1. If you have multiple PVs under LVM, but in the same VG, you can use pvmove to migrate extents between drives.

  2. I’m not sure I understood exactly what you want, but you can reorganize the mapping of logical to physical extents to distribute the load among different drives. There’s a script by Alexandre Oliva which helps you do that (http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.b…. Hope that helps!

  3. Isn’t there some striping option for vg/lv/pv ?I seem to remember that you can do that, but have never tried.OTOH maybe that implies having same size for al pvs…

  4. Can you explain why you think that having a swap-partition is _not_ silly?(I refrain from setting up swap even on 2GiB-machines; I’d rather have processes killed by the oom-killer, than my machine starting swapping like crazy and grinding to a halt)

  5. For xine testing, sometimes 2GB weren’t enough, so I had a swap partition on the old system, since I used the same disks and the same installation on the new one… it still has a swap partition.

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