Installation guide

Chapter 4. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 31
To create an LVM logical volume, you must first create partitions of type physical volume (LVM).
Once you have created one or more physical volume (LVM) partitions, select LVM to create an
LVM logical volume.
4.16.3. Partition Fields
Above the partition hierarchy are labels which present information about the partitions you are creat-
ing. The labels are defined as follows:
• Device: This field displays the partition’s device name.
• Mount Point/RAID/Volume: A mount point is the location within the directory hierarchy at which
a volume exists; the volume is "mounted" at this location. This field indicates where the partition is
mounted. If a partition exists, but is not set, then you need to define its mount point. Double-click
on the partition or click the Edit button.
• Type: This field shows the partition’s file system type (for example, ext2, ext3, or vfat).
• Format: This field shows if the partition being created will be formatted.
• Size (MB): This field shows the partition’s size (in MB).
• Start: This field shows the cylinder on your hard drive where the partition begins.
• End: This field shows the cylinder on your hard drive where the partition ends.
Hide RAID device/LVM Volume Group members: Select this option if you do not want to view
any RAID device or LVM Volume Group members that have been created.
4.16.4. Recommended Partitioning Scheme
Unless you have a reason for doing otherwise, we recommend that you create the following partitions
for Itanium systems:
• A /boot/efi/ partition (100 MB minimum) — the partition mounted on /boot/efi/ contains
all the installed kernels, the initrd images, and ELILO configuration files.
Warning
You must create a /boot/efi/ partition of type VFAT and at least 100 MB in size as the first
primary partition.
• A swap partition (at least 256 MB) — swap partitions are used to support virtual memory. In other
words, data is written to a swap partition when there is not enough RAM to store the data your
system is processing.
If you are unsure about what size swap partition to create, make it twice the amount of RAM on
your machine (but no larger than 2 GB). It must be of type swap.
Creation of the proper amount of swap space varies depending on a number of factors including the
following (in descending order of importance):
• The applications running on the machine.
• The amount of physical RAM is installed on the machine.
• The version of the OS.
Swap should equal 2x physical RAM for up to 2 GB of physical RAM, and then 1x physical RAM
for any amount above 2 GB, but never less than 32 MB.