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Well, the volume management will be there in 2.4. I'm using it right now actually. It's very nice.

As the LVM for Linux page points out, the LVM concept was initially developed by IBM and subsequently adopted by other systems, so this is an area that IBM understands probably better than anyone else (except maybe for third parties such as Veritas). Indeed, LVM was one of the main selling points for IBM's AIX when it first appeared in the early 90's, and helped IBM greatly to make inroads against incumbents Sun and HP.

Even though this technology obviously won't make it into the 2.4 release, it will dramatically strengthen Linux's enterprise capabilities when 2.6 ships, particularly when coupled with the journaling file system in that release. Flexible volume management is taken for granted by most commercial users today, and capable LVM functions in Linux will put its storage capabilities on par with almost every other operating system available.

Note, though, that regardless of the design of the LVM itself, there are some tricky issues that need to be resolved in the implementation with an actual file system. For example, it turns out that growing volumes is fairly straightforward, but shrinking them is much more difficult. The paper mentions that specific support is needed from the underlying file system to enable shrinking, so even with this "gift" from IBM, there is still a lot of work to be done to come up with a useable solution.

A good LVM for Linux is here.

LVM support, and USB support is enough for me. LVM makes disk partitioning and administration MUCH easier. Hello, to playing with new filesystems!

LVM (logical volume manager) has snapshot support. LVM is included in 2.3.47 and later.

http://linux.msede.com/lvm/

I've been using LVM for ages now and I think it's great. Works pretty much like HPUX's LVM but I don't know how that compares to AIX as i've never used it!

We need a logical volume manager! Heinz Mauelshagen has written one (read about it here, and it appears to be stable. This has got to be part of the Linux core before using it in a large environment is reasonable. Those of us coming from other Unix backgrounds have been gritting our teeth at the lack of both a mature JFS AND an LVM.

OK so it's not really _in_ the kernel yet (SIGN THE PETITION! :) ) but I love it and find it really useful - and I think its going to have to be integrated into the real kernel sometime soon if linux is really going to be successful in an enterprise environment. This implementation of LVM is really good imho. Check it out!

Two points :

Ext2resizeis free and will resize ext2 partitions.

What good is a X windows based disk partitioner when initially installing Linux? Setting up your partitions is the first thing to be done, configuring X is way, way, way in the distance.

Hamster

If you have any experience with AIX, you will know what a "mksysb" is. This is a system backup which stores as the first file in the backup the complete LOGICAL disk "partition" information. Since you can boot from tapes on RS/6000 machines, you can do a bare-metal restore from tape, and it creates all of the "partitions"/filesystems for you, and restores all of the files too. Of course, AIX uses a logical volume manager, so the concept of a "partition" isn't quite the same. However, an LVM implementation for Linux is available already (http://linux.msede.com/lvm/), so check it out too. My nascent idea is to make something like mksysb on Linux with LVM, so you can install straight from tape backup (with a boot floppy I guess) and have it set up partitions for you already, like AIX.