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LVM is a
Logical Volume Manager
for the Linux operating system.
Contents
Overview
Definitions
Encrypted LVM
Backing up passwords for encrypted LVM
Restore passwords
Using Encrypted LVM as a swap partition
Labels
/boot
LVM cached volumes
Installation
List of LVM commands
Physical Volumes (PV)
Create a PV
Remove a PV
List of PV commands
Volume Groups (VG)
Create a volume group
Extend a volume group
Renaming a volume group
List VGs
List of VG commands
Logical Volumes (LV)
Create an LV
Remove a LV
Increase the size of a partition using LVM
Shrinking a partition using LVM
List of LV commands
Graphical applications for managing LVM
KDE PartitionManager
Blivet-GUI
See also:
Overview
Logical volume management with LVM provides a more flexible way to manage the disk space on a system than the traditional approach of dividing a disk into partitions. LVM gives the system administrator much more flexibility in allocating storage, because partitions controlled by LVM be resized and moved around, and a single partition can reside on more than one physical hard disk.
Definitions
PV
: Physical Volumes. This means a hard disk, hard disk partition, RAID or LUNs from a SAN.
VG
: Volume Groups. This is a collection of one or more Physical Volumes.
LV
: Logical Volumes. LVs sit inside a Volume Group and form, in effect, a virtual partition.
PE
: Physical Extents. In order to manipulate the actual data, it is divided into blocks called
hysical
xtents.
LE
: Logical Extents. Similar to Physical Extents, but at the Logical Volume level. Physical Extents are to Physical Volumes as Logical Extents are to Logical Volumes. The size of blocks are the same for each logical volume (LV) in the same volume group (VG).
The most important terms for users are the PVs, VGs and LVs.
An example:
||-------------------------OS----------------------------||
||-------------------------LVM---------------------------||
|| LV-1 (/) |LV-2 (swap)| LV 3 (/home) | LV-4 (/tmp)|| Logical Volumes (LV)
||------------------------------------------|------------||
|| VG 1 | VG 2 || Volume Groups (VG)
||------------------------------------------|------------||
|| /dev/sda2 | /dev/sda3 | /dev/sdb2 | /dev/sdd4 || Physical Volumes (PV)
||-------------------------------------------------------||
Encrypted LVM
When formatting an LVM volume, you can choose whether to encrypt the data on it or not. Using encrypted LVM is recommended if you are worried about your computer or disk storage being stolen.
LVM (
last modified 2025-10-20 12:52:09
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