Installation guide

Appendix B. The LVM Configuration

Files

LVM supports multiple configuration files. At system startup, the lvm.conf configuration file is loaded

from the directory specified by the environment variable LVM_SYSTEM_DIR, which is set to /etc/lvm

by default.

The lvm.conf file can specify additional configuration files to load. Settings in later files override

settings from earlier ones. To display the settings in use after loading all the configuration files,

execute the lvm dumpconfig command.

For information on loading additional configuration files, see Section C.2, “Host Tags”.

B.1. The LVM Configuration Files

The following files are used for LVM configuration:

/etc/lvm/lvm.conf

Central configuration file read by the tools.

etc/lvm/lvm_hosttag.conf

For each host tag, an extra configuration file is read if it exists: lvm_hosttag.conf. If that file

defines new tags, then further configuration files will be appended to the list of tiles to read in. For

information on host tags, see Section C.2, “Host Tags”.

In addition to the LVM configuration files, a system running LVM includes the following files that affect

LVM system setup:

/etc/lvm/cache/.cache

Device name filter cache file (configurable).

/etc/lvm/backup/

Directory for automatic volume group metadata backups (configurable).

/etc/lvm/archive/

Directory for automatic volume group metadata archives (configurable with regard to directory path

and archive history depth).

/var/lock/lvm/

In single-host configuration, lock files to prevent parallel tool runs from corrupting the metadata; in

a cluster, cluster-wide DLM is used.

B.2. Sample lvm.conf File

The following is a sample lvm.conf configuration file. Your configuration file may differ slightly from

this one.

# This is an example configuration file for the LVM2 system.

# It contains the default settings that would be used if there was no

# /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file.

# Refer to 'man lvm.conf' for further information including the file layout.

# To put this file in a different directory and override /etc/lvm set