Monday, April 14, 2014

IOLVMPartitionScheme - Basic Linux LVM support in Mac OS X

Today I'm publishing a new project on github:
https://github.com/unsound/IOLVMPartitionScheme
Some time ago I wrote a Mac OS X kernel extension for parsing and exposing simple Linux LVM volumes as partitions, mostly for my own use at home since I have various Linux distributions set up on many of my Macs. Many of those use an LVM layout for the root file system, which means Mac OS X cannot access it (e.g. using fuse-ext2).
Today the code is available on github under an LGPL v2.1 license. This should hopefully be usefeul to anyone having the same problem as I did.
This kernel extension simplifies an LVM layout into a partition scheme. This means that only single-PV LVM layouts are supported and only contiguous simple LVM volumes are exposed as partitions.
It has not been widely tested, only by myself internally. Feedback is much appreciated.
Possible future development may include extending this kernel extension to fully supporting LVM concatenated volumes spanning several drives, snapshots, etc. (This is not currently planned.)
Precompiled kernel extension:
IOLVMPartitionScheme-2014.11.15.tar.bz2 (source code)
Supported Mac OS X versions: 10.5 and higher (i386, x86_64 and ppc kernels are supported)
Please report any problems encountered as issues on github:
https://github.com/unsound/IOLVMPartitionScheme/issues
Old versions:
IOLVMPartitionScheme-2014.4.14f1.tar.bz2 (source code)
IOLVMPartitionScheme-2014.4.14.tar.bz2 (source code)