On 06/23/2015 01:54 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
So the story ended up with lots of people in upgrading griefs purely because they couldn't resize the separate /boot partition, and it was separate because LVM was present, and LVM was present with the goal of making partition resizing easy! A textbook example of a catch-22, unbelievable!!
The Fedora /boot upsize was something I handled relatively easily with the LVM tools and another drive. I actually used an eSATA drive for this, but an internal or a USB external (which would have impacted system performance) could have been used. Here's what I did to resize my Fedora /boot when the upgrade required it several years back:
1.) Added a second drive that was larger than the drive that /boot was on; 2.) Created a PV on that drive; 3.) Added that PV to the volume group corresponding to the PV on the drive with /boot; 4.) Did a pvmove from the PV on the drive with /boot to the second drive (which took quite a while); 5.) Removed the PV on the drive with /boot from the volume group; 6.) Deleted the partition that previously contained the PV; 7.) Resized the /boot partition and its filesystem (this is doable while online, whereas resizing / online can be loads of fun); 8.) Created a new PV on the drive containing /boot; 9.) Added that PV back to the volume group; 10.) Resized the filesystems on the logical volumes on the volume group to shrink it to fit the new PV's space and resized the LV's accordingly (may require single-user mode to shrink some filesystems); 11.) Did a pvmove from the secondary drive back to the drive with /boot; 12.) Removed the secondary drive's PV from the VG (and removed the drive from the system).
I was able to do this without a reboot step or going into single user mode since I had not allocated all of the space in the VG to LV's, so I was able to skip step 10. While the pvmoves were executing the system was fully up and running, but with degraded performance; no downtime was experienced until the maintenance window to do the version upgrade. Once step 12 completed, I was able to do the upgrade with no issues with /boot size and no loss of data on the volume group on the /boot drive.