Re: parted/LVM for ET [Re: [Libvir] Storage manager initial requirements and thoughts

Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I talked to Alasdair Kergon about all of this on Tuesday, and there are a few clarifications. Firstly, vgscan & vgdisplay are apparently deprecated (who knew?) and there is a new command (vgs) which replaces both. The good news is that vgs is designed so that the output can be parsed: # /usr/sbin/vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree Home 1 1 0 wz--n- 298.09G 8.09G VolGroup00 1 2 0 wz--n- 152.56G 32.00M versus the old way: # /usr/sbin/vgdisplay Home --- Volume group --- VG Name Home System ID Format lvm2 Metadata Areas 1 Metadata Sequence No 2 [etc] Similarly, pvs instead of pvscan/pvdisplay and lvs instead of lvscan/lvdisplay. Secondly there is an API of sorts for lvm2. I think Alasdair called it "libcmd", but maybe I got that wrong because Google doesn't seem to turn up anything. In any case, all it is is a wrapper around the command line tools, so it seems doubtful that this is going to be any better than just invoking the command line tools ourselves. Thirdly, Alasdair is quite keen to see a proper programming API for LVM2. However I don't think anyone has the time to do it, and he has the usual concerns for backwards binary compatibility and making sure the API mirrors the command line tools. LVM2 is still evolving at a fair rate. There are few other candidates to use the API at the moment, but apparently Anaconda does some really nasty stuff directly on LVM2 structures so it should be changed to use an API instead. My current opinion is that we can use libparted as it is to both manage virt-on-partition scenarios and to find orphan PVs as candidates to add to a VG, and the command line tools like vgs to manage and allocate LVM2 partitions. Rich. -- Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/ 64 Baker Street, London, W1U 7DF Mobile: +44 7866 314 421 "[Negative numbers] darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple" (Francis Maseres FRS, mathematician, 1759)