Very amusing how I had to track down all of these steps word for word before I found this at least I can have a second opinion and feel like I did it on my own best of both world
Another great video in this series, I used to love volume managers on hp-ux and AIX, these days with big drives and more reliable hardware I tend to no longer use any.
Thanks Niels :) I use LVM on my main machine with 4 drives in it. The cool thing is you can also tell the system if you prefer to have some data on a specific disk. The flexibility of adding or removing drives is also a great plus for me. It happened to me once: one drive was going to fail, moved the data on it to another volume on the logical partition; added a new disk, extended the lvm and voilà. Saved my day :)
In the company that I work that is one of the biggest companies of my country the main SAP server (whole landscape actually) the actual ERP which is the financial module still uses AIX with LVM, we are just stepping into migrating this to RHEL8, but I have to say I will not have any nostalgia once that AIX is gone eheh still powerfull but in my personal opinion unnecesarilly hard to manage but usually... ofc very stable.
I would like to switch to arch linux on my main computer, Context: I have a year of Debian (CLI, or XFCE) experience as IT student, and I used Ubuntu(Unity, KDE, Gnome) on my personal computer for 2-3 years, My "computer hobbies" are Python Dev, basic web dev (php need), Octave for Maths, setting up network on software like Cisco Packet Tracer, also playing games like minecraft (I know I'm too old to play this kind of games), or even sometimes World of tanks using Lutris. Plus, I need a small windows VM to run some IT programs that works only on Win*.... I don't have tried i3 yet, so I still hesitate to install i3 on arch following your tutorials. Is i3 stable ? is i3 allowing everything like others ? Well, what's your opinion about i3 as DE ? What DE would you recommend for my hobbies ? Thank you for your videos and your time, (and sorry for my English, I'm still improving it).
I second that if you haven't already made a video about it and I cannot find it,especially with BTRFS and maybe keep an existing "home" subvolume and install only system root subvolume.Thanks
4 года назад
You make great Arch videos. Congrats, pal... Fábio Nogueira Salvador / Bahia / Brasil
Splendid! When you explain this quite advanced topic, I'm reminded of an awesome professor at university who succeeded in breaking down something complicated into bite sized bits that were easy to swallow. I'm interested in what you propose to tackle in a future video (15:30). If possible, I'd also be interested in encrypted LVM volumes, preferably with systemd boot (but this would be optional). Thank you so much for the awesome content you provide which exceeds base level tutorials!
Hey thanks! My goal is trying to provide the easiest possible explanations, and I am always happy when someone can benefit from that :) In the coming days, I'll do a video for an install with encryption, and after that I'll combine it with LVM :)
Thanks for the answer earlier about the perceived load speeds with mixed drives, if it's slight in real time then ok. I was also wondering, let's say root is on one drive and /home is partially on that drive, sda for example. /home extends to sdb and sdc. Sdb fails. What happens to data and is there any reliable way to tell what's on which drive? Also, you have my vote for a more in depth look at lvm in another video, with snapshots... It would also be good if you could do one on the pros and cons of different partitioning systems, like separating out var, or opt, and so forth.
That's a great idea, I'll definitely do that. To answer your question, normally you get some signals before the drive start failing. At that moment you can move what is on that drive to another place in the lvm. Also, when installing lvm, there are ways to tell the system which drive you prefer to use. Say you want to have a specific directory on a specific disk, you can tell lvm to do that.
@@eflinux That's a nice feature, I didn't know you could do that, please add it to your list if you do the in-depth lvm video. Can it be done after installation, ie. can you move a directory anytime in some fashion, or must it be declared at installation? Seems if you can move data from a failing drive, maybe you can also change directory locations on the fly? or not?
Lvm seems like the best solution for 2 or more drives. I plan on adding a 3rd to a newer laptop I am getting shortly. I anticipate dual booting at first, then hopefully eliminating the windows install. Can lvm be set up later after dropping windows without having to do a clean install of arch at that point, or, can I install arch with lvm at first? Would it install alongside the windows installation partitions, or somehow incorporate them in one big lvm environment? (That detailed lvm video idea is looking better and better to me...;-) )
LVM is indeed great for multiple drives. I have the same setup in my machine. It's possible to convert to LVM, but I honestly wouldn't do that. I'd rather resintall.
Before failing, the drive will signal some errors. In this case you can move the content of the physical volume to another place in the lvm. Then you can replace the volume and extend lvm again. It is anyway critical to have a backup, not only for drive failure but also for power outages.
I have only one request no hurry on it when you have time, and that if a user want to wipe his Archlinux and start over, let say to use LVM and want to backup his /home folder and add it back when the fresh install done. Here the step to do to find his install packages then install them back, then add the /home from backup, I know these steps already, but will be great video from you indeed, thanks in advanced if you reconsider this.
It worked like a charm; love you bro, keep up the good work; when I say perfect, I mean perfect!!!, and you make everything sound super easy :-) I had ZFS BSD before, so not for the faint of the heart, and created an LVM with 5 disks, but it works, and I have to thank you for it. Really appreciate it.
also wifi-menu was replaced with iwctl you have already mentioned this in a seperate video and on your newer install video but this is for anybody looking for help in the comment.
I think this may be the answer to my problems I got a 500gb and a 1 tb nvme drives on my laptop and I don't want to make my root partition 500 gb. I think thats way to much so this would allow me to have say a 150gb root with the rest as my home. I've also got a 1tb mechanical drive in my laptop, I'm guessing it would probably be wise just to create an Lvm out of the 2 Nvme drives and leave the mech out. Thanks as always for the video am looking forward to the next vid on the i3 window manager.
@@eflinux Here's a question somewhat related to Darren's: with mixed drives (SSD nvme & physical HDDs), what is the real world effect of such different access and read speeds if they are all storing /home or the / directories, for example? Do certain files display faster than others, or does it all get perceived as the same?
Hi Tony, yes, there will be a difference, as that is a hardware related thing. But in most cases, you probably won't notice the different in normal use.
One other totally unrelated question (sorry), I have looked at a number of your arch install variations (all great and all distinct and useful, btw). There was one I now can't find that showed how to properly set trim for an ssd drive, could you post that command again here please? Thanks again, ermanno.
You can create several logical volumes in a volume group, that’s a not a problem, but not petitions. Partitions in a volume group are the logical volumes.
Right now I am suddenly going to have to install arch in a hurry tomorrow, and will have to add a 3rd drive later. I also have to dual boot for now and is it true that Windows doesn't do too well with lvm? So, if I skip the lvm for now, and split the SDD with windows & arch, then for the second HDD, can I just make a partition entry of /dev/sdb1 and just mount it at /home/storage (or something) for now? Arch's /home itself would still be on the SDD drive the OSs are on, with extra storage on the HDD. For now windows would be mounted at /home/windows to share like you suggested. I have already shrunken the windows partition down to 100GB. Then later I can reinstall when I wipe windows and properly set up the lvm environment. What do you think, is there a smoother way, or would this work?
And wouldn't I need to convert the sdb1 hdd from ntfs to an ext4 file system before mounting it at /mnt/storage for arch to use it properly? Sorry for so many questions, ermanno....
@@eflinux Thanks for that, ermanno. Well, I just started the installation and right after the timedatectl command when I enter pacman -Syyy to sync the servers, I get a long string of repeating errors. The keywords seem to be PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Data Link Layer ... on to BadDLLP, with a few error messages after that. Any idea as to what is happening and how to fix it? The arch forum has some of these errors with slightly different specifics, but none right at installation that I can find.
![[1c] | Arch Linux Base Install on UEFI with LVM](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
