LVM/Ubuntu/PowerPC
September 10, 2007 11:06 am GeneralYesterday, upgraded Ubuntu on my Power G5 from Feisty to Gutsy. Everything is smooth so far.
Additionally, tried to change a couple of partitions to LVM. Found a couple of interesting things:
1. I could not create a partition of type 8e (Linux LVM) on PowerPC. Neither fdisk not parted could help. I found the answer during the discussion with some smart folks on #gentoo-ppc (I always knew gentooers are smart, though I would never use their distro): first, fdisk on PPC is a symlink to mac-fdisk which has nothing to do with PC-oriented “usual” fdisk, second, the format of the partition table on Mac (Apple Partition Map, APM) has absolutely no relation to good old MBR/PT on PC, so signatures like 8x, 83 (ext2) etc make no sense whatsoever. So, just creating empty partition of type Apple_Unix_SVR2 was good enough – it worked ok for me, anyway.
2. Unfortunately, Ubuntu has problems with /var on LVM. The partition is mounted too late, so first parts of the init process gets screwed up (error messages about missing /var/lock and /var/run). So, I had to move /var back to “normal” partition. Pity. If anyone has idea how to fix it – please tell me. Going to file a bug in launchpad anyway.
September 10th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
I’m not sure about /var on LVM, but putting your entire / on LVM works just fine on Ubuntu. I think your explanation of the varrun/lock being tried first is reasonable… and we should probably fix it.
September 10th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Maybe you could try
apt-get install e2tools
e2mkdir /dev/partition-that-has-your-root-fs:/var/run
e2mkdir /dev/partition-that-has-your-root-fs:/var/lock
e.g. ‘e2mkdir /dev/sda1:/var/run’
This way you would have a /var/run and /var/lock before your real /var was mounted. Of course, when that happens the stuff Ubuntu put there will be hidden underneath.
September 10th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Jerome: well, I am not ready yet to put entire root to LVM. As a start, I decided to put just home and var (may be usr as well). And got that disappointment 🙁
Ryan: I even can temporary umount /var in single-user mode, in order to create those dirs, as well as /var/run/network etc. But I do not like that hack, because the temporary files created by init might be used by someone later… In a word, that solution is too hackish. For a moment, I’ll just wait for the fix.
September 13th, 2007 at 1:29 am
have similar problem with lvm,
solution is to create /var/run and /var/lock dirs on root filesystem http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/UbuntuVarRun
September 14th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
dsoul: thanks for the link. The information is interesting. Did you file a bug in launchpad?