Thread: Lvm

In this case, we would only have two primary partitions. The second primary partition is an LVM volume group. LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager. tldp.org defines LVM as " ... a collection of programs that allow larger physical disks to be reassembled into 'logical' disks that can be shrunk or expanded as data needs change."

LVM can combine multiple physical disks into one volume. Consider /home as a partition of 40 GB that is filled up. All that has to be done is to put in a new physical disk, say of capacity 80 GB and add it to the current volume group. Then resize the home partition to the maximum available size, thus making it 120 GB.



LVM gives the user great flexibility at any point in time to freely resize the logical volumes in a volume group without actually caring for the data in it. The above solution may not be suitable for laptops since adding another physical drive is not possible, but yet accordingly resizing partitions as per space usage, is possible. Like in the above case, if the /home partition is filled and the other / partition has a lot of space, according to usage, the other partition can be shrunk and more space can be allocated to the Ihome partition. The swap partition can also be shrunk to give space to the /home partition, but this has to be done after a lot of observation of the usage of the swap partition. Once it is definite that the swap partition usage will not exceed a particular limit, the swap partition can be shrunk to just above that limit.