can install FreeBSD on LVM?

icecoke said:
SirDice - what is about
/boot/kernel/geom_linux_lvm.ko

? Have no 11 atm, but in 10.2 it's exting.
Click to expand...
The man page geom_linux_lvm(4) has a bunch of caveats already: you can't allocate/resize LVM volumes from FreeBSD and it only supports linear stripes. If that is all ok you can probably put your root fs on an LVM volume. However I doubt that the FreeBSD loader understands LVM. It will not be able to load the kernel from it, so a separate boot partition is very likely necessary. Using the FreeBSD installer without manual intervention is also right out. I can imagine that this is a configuration not a lot of people have tried, so I'd expect trouble there as well.

Given the limitations I'm not sure what problems installing FreeBSD on LVM solves?
 
It's a fairly recent addition to allow access to LVM volumes from FreeBSD. The only filesystems FreeBSD will be able to boot from is ZFS and UFS.
 
Yampress said:
lvm?? There in FreeBSD is zfs. The best filesystem on the word. Zfs is better solution than linux lvm
Click to expand...
LVM is not a file system and neither is ZFS. LVM is volume manager. NetBSD has LVM as well as DragonFly BSD. I am not sure how well it works on those two operating systems as I have never used it outside of the Linux (adding space to a partitions and one other thing which I don't even remember). ZFS is volume manager and a file system in one. I don't use ZFS grow volume feature but IIRC they were not as good as on the Solaris version. Comparing LVM and ZFS is comparing apples and oranges. Based on the formulation of OP original question he is better off not trying FreeBSD.
 
Last edited:
I've used LVM for many years on various debian linux machines. Yes, its better than no volume management at all, but it gets horribly slow over time and with many drives and fails catastrophically when metadata gets corrupted (faulty drives, misbehaving RAID controller etc pp). Snapshots are a pain on LVM and make it even slower.
Some of these linux installations (that weren't replaced with FreeBSD) got migrated to zfs; which is stable, but the integration is a bit wonky, especially when it comes to GRUB and replaced/shuffled drives. Still i'd rather migrate the linux installation to ZFS. Thanks to overlay-mounts you can even use the "same" home-directory with both OS by putting all configuration-dotfiles and -dotfolders on seperate datasets for each OS and mount the dataset with your actual userdata on top.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top