I ran into something a couple of weeks ago that I'd never seen before: A filesystem (ext3 I believe) installed to a storage device without a partition. In essence /dev/sdb was the entire filesystem. I know many filesystems can be extended into empty space, so doing this allows extending without dealing with LVM or some other kind of volume manager, but are there any other advantages for setting up storage this way?The specific case I saw was as the ephemeral data volume for a number crunching server, the boot and root volumes were traditional partitions on a different storage device entirely. -
The merits of a partitionless filesystem
filesystems;partition;lvm
Pro: you don't waste one disk sector on a partition table. (Yay.)Pro: the disk can be used in an operating system that doesn't support PC-style partitions. (Like you're going to use one.)Con: this is unusual and may confuse co-sysadmins. (See?)Irrelevant: extending the filesystem is not easier if it's directly on the disk than if it's in a partition, nor vice versa. (Being on LVM would make it easier.)Conclusion: it works, but it's not a good idea.