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 lvmconfig command.
For information on loading additional configuration files, see Section D.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 files to read in. For information on host tags, see Section D.2, “Host Tags”. - LVM profiles
- An LVM profile is a set of selected customizable configuration settings that can be implemented for specific environments. The settings in an LVM profile can be used to override existing configuration. For information on LVM profiles see Section B.3, “LVM Profiles”.
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.
