The past year has seen a great deal of development in this area.

The current LVM system reached maturity with the 1.0.x series, adding a variety of improvements and new features over the 0.8 series (such as snapshots, the ability to move live volumes).

LVM2 is a new downwardly-compatible implementation of LVM using a lightweight kernel driver known as the 'device mapper'. This provides generic support for volume management. All volume managers--not just LVM--will benefit from this work.

The new LVM2 framework has allowed yet more features to be implemented, including:

• Writeable high-performance snapshots
• Sophisticated remapping tools
• Greatly enhanced configurability
• Human-readable (and editable) backups
• Atomic metadata updates
• Maximal data recovery in the event of disk failure
• Cluster awareness

The aims of this talk are:

1. To introduce existing LVM concepts and tools under Linux
2. To explain the architecture we used for LVM2 and the device mapper, and to discuss the extra features and performance improvements provided.

The talk will be given by Heinz Mauelshagen and Alasdair Kergon on behalf of the LVM development team.