Booting an lvm snapshot of /

When it becomes time to upgrade Mandriva, or in fact, any other distro, I always have the same problem. I don’t want to do an upgrade because I can’t easily go back if the upgrade fails. So I usually end up creating a fresh install with a different root volume in LVM, then installing the same packages and copying configuration across, as I see fit. Good, but could be better.

I’ve also found I do keep wanting to try stuff, which would be nice to be able to roll back to a known state if things turn bad. So, recently I investigated how to create LVM snapshots of the root filesystem (/).

The procedure below works for me.. but if you don’t understand it, don’t try this on an important system.

Here is my basic howto:
The example below assumes your root volume is /dev/vg/rootlv. It assumes your /boot partition is a normal partition, not part of /.

1. Create a snapshot of / (which I usually do while it’s running, which means it’s not 100% clean). I create this with the following command.
lvcreate -n rootsnap1 -L 5G -s /dev/vg/rootlv
2. Mount the snapshot in /mnt/rootsnap1
mkdir /mnt/rootsnap1; mount /dev/vg/rootsnap1 /mnt/rootsnap1
3. Adjust snapshot to be able to boot:
perl -pi -e "s#/dev/vg/rootlv#/dev/vg/rootsnap1#" /mnt/rootsnap1/etc/fstab
rm /mnt/rootsnap1/etc/mtab
umount /mnt/rootsnap1
4. Create yourself a copy of initrd that has the new root volume in it. I do this by just editing the current one.
mkdir /boot/tt
cd /boot/tt
cat ../initrd.img | gunzip | cpio -i
perl -pi -e "s#/dev/vg/rootlv#/dev/vg/rootsnap1#" init
find . | cpio -H newc -o | gzip -9 > ../initrd-rootsnap1.img
cd /boot
rm -rf /boot/tt
5. Add the new root snapshot1 to grub’s menu.1st file, by copying your existing entry and changing the copied entry:
initrd.img to initrd-rootsnap1.img
root=/dev/vg/rootlv to root=/dev/vg/rootsnap1
vi /boot/grub/menu.1st
6. Reboot and choose new entry from grub.

Notes:
1. If the snapshot gets full, you’ll loose access to it and the volume it is a snapshot of, until you fix it. You can however, make it bigger at any time before it is full. It will never use more than the size of the original volume.
2. Snapshots can be merged* (fairly new feature) back into the base for that snapshot. This means that changes on a snapshot can be tried and if successful, can be merged back into the base. See lvconvert.
(*note, you don’t want to have the snapshot, or the base mounted at the time. lvconvert will delay until next reboot if you do. Reboot twice for it to completely free up the snapshot space used.)
3. If you take multiple snapshots, it is best to not do large amounts of writes to the base for the snapshots, as every block changed on the base will first have to be copied to every snapshot which affects write performance.

Readers: Comments are welcome, however I do moderate them, so they don’t appear on my blog immediately.