Subject: Re: Possible summer of code project: Logical Volume Manager (request for comments!)
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Patrick Welche <prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/04/2005 18:29:32
On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 09:04:44PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Near Equivalents in NetBSD
> --------------------------
> Vinum: so it's described as a volume manager, but really it's more of
> a RAID implementation.  It still only has normal BSD disklabels on top
> of it, so you can't do any of the fun expand-partitions-on-the-fly
> stuff you can with LVM.
> 
> CCD: lets you glue discs together; same limitations as Vinum :-/
> 
> growfs: there's a growfs tool in the Netbsd source tree, although the
> documentation claims it to be incomplete and not useful for FFS2 yet.
> Fixing this would have to be part of a sane LVM implementation for
> NetBSD.  Being able to growfs a mounted filesystem would be nice but
> implementing that far exceeds my current knowledge of filesystem voodoo.
> 
> Previous attempts at porting LVM: this mailing list post -
>     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2003/02/04/0012.html
> describes a port of LVM to NetBSD 1.6 a couple of years ago.  It
> appears to have been completely ignored by the world, but would
> probably still be a useful starting point.  The referenced pkgsrc
> tarball for device mapper says "licensing unclear" which is a bit
> off-putting though...

I thought that "wedges" where the nearest equivalent? Then again, I haven't
seen LVM. c.f. dkctl(8) addwedge etc.

Cheers,

Patrick