Question on HP's LVM History

[Dan Matlock_1]

Does anyone know where HP's LVM came from? I have a AIX guy here that says HP took it from IBM.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

I have never worked on AIX, but during my participation in this forum I have many times read that HP's LVM is drived from IBM's LVM.

Someone working on both and that too from long back shall be able to describe it much better for you.

HTH,
Devender

[Rick Garland]

The LVM also has a history with Veritas in the implementation of journal (vxfs) filesystems

[Geoff Wild]

According to this page:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part6/

The Open Software Foundation (OSF) released its Unix called OSF/1
end of 1991. Still requires an SVR2 license.
Compatible/compliant with SVID 2 (and 3 coming), POSIX,
X/Open, etc.. OSF members include Apollo, Dec, HP, IBM, ....

- OSF/1 (1991):
- based on Mach 2.5 kernel
- symmetric multiprocessing, parallelized kernel, threads
- logical volumes, disk mirroring, UFS (native), S5 FS, NFS
- enhanced security (B1 with some B2, B3; or C2), 4.3BSD admin
- STREAMS, TLI/XTI, sockets
- shared libs, dynamic loader (incl. kernel)
- Motif GUI

So, Apollo, Dec, HP, IBM created LVM jointly...



According to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX

LVM wasn't implemented into HP-UX until version 10.0 circa 1995....

IBM implemented LVM in version 3.x - sometime after 1990...



Rgds...Geoff

[morganelan]

Incidentally, LVM was originally developed by
IBM and adopted by the OSF (now the Open Group).in 1995 the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) was presented at HPUX 10.0 as a replacement for the older methods of disk management.
HP-UX was also among the first Unix systems to include a built-in Logical Volume Manager, a derivative of the Veritas volume manager. HP has had a long partnership with Veritas, and they use VxFS as their primary file system. For technical reasons, however, the file system used for the boot kernel has remained HFS (a variant of UFS) and so this older technology has continued to receive support from HP.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Just to clarify: LVM is a volume manager with no relationship to filesystems. It simply connects disks and carves up the space into volumes. The content of a logical volume is defined by other subsystems. For instance, an lvol could be a raw swap area, a dump area for an OS crash, a raw database area for Informix or Sybase or Oracle, or it might could contain a filesystem. LVM is licensed from IBM.

HP-UX has two local filesystems available: HFS and VxFS. HFS is the McKusick fast file system but is seldom used except for /stand (due to processor ROM limitations on PA-RISC hardware). VxFS is the Veritas filesystem and is the most popular way to store files. NOTE: VxFS and easily confused with the Veritas volume manager called VxVM. Just like LVM, VxVM has nothing to do with filesystems, it is a method to connect disks and carve up the space into logical volumes.

[dirk dierickx]

I don't know where your AIX guy is getting his info from, but LVM on hpux is made by Veritas.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
I will backup Bill here:
I started in beginning 94 to take care of a 855s running HP-UX 8.XX but I was a real novice from developpemnt with no knowledge of administration or system engineering (No access to forums and was alone...), and remembered reading about HPUX 9 LVM, when you had to deal with sections and no possibilities of extending files systems other than recreate and NO way of layout on more than 1 disk you can imagine how impatient as was to have a new box (H50)and do a migration. I found the thing terrific (HP-UX 9.04) You cant imagine the relief it was... But the file system was still HFS, you could not extend as we understand that term now but having the possibility of adding blocks and recreate the file system bigger (because I dont remember if you did a extendfs but what Im sure is you had to backup or loose every thing...) and spread on another disk...
So LVM was introduced with HPUX 9 in 92 as a new concept for disk management, NO change in file system...
JFS came with HPUX10.00 and VXFS was introduced with HPUX10.20 and used LVM for disk managment


All the best
Victor

[Bill Hassell]

VxVM is the Veritas Volume Manager. IBM invented and owns the LVM code and licenses it to several platforms including HP-UX and Linux: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp0107.html

[Dan Matlock_1]

thanx