# can install FreeBSD on LVM?



## duyinthee (Feb 23, 2016)

I am new to FreeBSD and thinking to install it on my laptop which is running Linux on LVM.

Can I install FreeBSD on LVM?


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## SirDice (Feb 23, 2016)

No, FreeBSD has no support for LVM.


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## icecoke (Oct 24, 2016)

SirDice - what is about 
/boot/kernel/geom_linux_lvm.ko

? Have no 11 atm, but in 10.2 it's exting.


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## tobik@ (Oct 24, 2016)

icecoke said:


> SirDice - what is about
> /boot/kernel/geom_linux_lvm.ko
> 
> ? Have no 11 atm, but in 10.2 it's exting.


The man page geom_linux_lvm(4) has a bunch of caveats already: you can't allocate/resize LVM volumes from FreeBSD and it only supports linear stripes. If that is all ok you can probably put your root fs on an LVM volume. However I doubt that the FreeBSD loader understands LVM.  It will not be able to load the kernel from it, so a separate boot partition is very likely necessary. Using the FreeBSD installer without manual intervention is also right out. I can imagine that this is a configuration not a lot of people have tried, so I'd expect trouble there as well.

Given the limitations I'm not sure what problems installing FreeBSD on LVM solves?


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## SirDice (Oct 24, 2016)

It's a fairly recent addition to allow access to LVM volumes from FreeBSD. The only filesystems FreeBSD will be able to _boot_ from is ZFS and UFS.


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## Yampress (Oct 24, 2016)

lvm??  There in FreeBSD is zfs. The best filesystem on the word. Zfs is  better solution than linux lvm


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## Oko (Oct 25, 2016)

Yampress said:


> lvm??  There in FreeBSD is zfs. The best filesystem on the word. Zfs is  better solution than linux lvm


LVM is not a file system and neither is ZFS. LVM is volume manager. NetBSD has LVM as well as DragonFly BSD. I am not sure how well it works on those two operating systems as I have never used it outside of the Linux (adding space to a partitions and one other thing which I don't even remember). ZFS is volume manager and a file system in one. I don't use ZFS grow volume feature but IIRC they were not as good as on the Solaris version. Comparing LVM and ZFS is comparing apples and oranges. Based on the formulation of OP original question he is better off not trying FreeBSD.


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## sko (Oct 26, 2016)

I've used LVM for many years on various debian linux machines. Yes, its better than no volume management at all, but it gets horribly slow over time and with many drives and fails catastrophically when metadata gets corrupted (faulty drives, misbehaving RAID controller etc pp). Snapshots are a pain on LVM and make it even slower.
Some of these linux installations (that weren't replaced with FreeBSD) got migrated to zfs; which is stable, but the integration is a bit wonky, especially when it comes to GRUB and replaced/shuffled drives. Still i'd rather migrate the linux installation to ZFS. Thanks to overlay-mounts you can even use the "same" home-directory with both OS by putting all configuration-dotfiles and -dotfolders on seperate datasets for each OS and mount the dataset with your actual userdata on top.


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