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FreeBSD LVM2

LVM2 has been designed and implemented for the Linux kernel. Unfortunately — while FreeBSD features gvinum which provides similar services — the two systems are not compatible and so interoperability is not possible.

Having both systems working together with the same data requires either to implement gvinum for GNU/Linux or LVM2 for FreeBSD. I chose the second option, being more aware of FreeBSD internals than Linux.

Work in progress

Right now, no kernel module is available.

April 29th, 2008
Wow! Already nearly 1 year without touching to this project! The good news is that Andrew Thompson (thompsa@) was working on this too and had good results. His work was committed to 8-CURRENT but didn't have the time / hardware to test and review it yet.
July 26th, 2007
First thoughts about this project;
August 5th, 2007
I provide an userland tool, lvm2hack, capable of extracting LVM2 logical volumes from physical disks. I blogged about it: Dumping LVM2 logical volumes under FreeBSD. Further development is still required on this tool before thinking about playing with kernel data structures;
August 10th, 2007
Revision @33 of lvm2hack exports simple logical volumes as well as more complex LVM2 setups with logical volumes spread on two physical devices. While some more tests are required, I should start looking at Geom soon.
August 14th, 2007
Revision @36 of lvm2hack can extract logical volumes of my test physiscal volume images on my 32 bits little-endian i386 as well as on my 64 bits big-endian sparc64.

Related blog posts

August 4th, 2007
Dumping LVM2 logical volumes under FreeBSD
August 29th, 2007
Learning GEOM: Tasting

Grab the source!

You can track the project on the FreeBSD LVM2 Subversion repository.