5.4.17. Controlling Logical Volume Activation

You can flag a logical volume to be skipped during normal activation commands with the -k or --setactivationskip {y|n} option of the lvcreate or lvchange command. This flag is not applied during deactivation.

You can determine whether this flag is set for a logical volume with the lvs command, which displays the k attribute as in the following example.

# lvs vg/thin1s1
LV         VG  Attr       LSize Pool  Origin
thin1s1    vg  Vwi---tz-k 1.00t pool0 thin1

By default, thin snapshot volumes are flagged for activation skip. You can activate a logical volume with the k attribute set by using the -K or --ignoreactivationskip option in addition to the standard -ay or --activate y option.

The following command activates a thin snapshot logical volume.

# lvchange -ay -K VG/SnapLV

The persistent "activation skip" flag can be turned off when the logical volume is created by specifying the -kn or --setactivationskip n option of the lvcreate command. You can turn the flag off for an existing logical volume by specifying the -kn or --setactivationskip n option of the lvchange command. You can turn the flag on again with the -ky or --setactivationskip y option.

The following command creates a snapshot logical volume without the activation skip flag

# lvcreate --type thin -n SnapLV -kn -s ThinLV --thinpool VG/ThinPoolLV

The following command removes the activation skip flag from a snapshot logical volume.

# lvchange -kn VG/SnapLV

You can control the default activation skip setting with the auto_set_activation_skip setting in the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file.