Fedora 35 server arm7hf leaves unclaimed disk space? Previously unfamiliar with lvm

Hi

I just used https://arm.fedoraproject.org/ the ARM server image and flashed it to a usb drive(16GB Sandisk Cruzer) with the manual method mentioned here Architectures/ARM/Raspberry Pi - Fedora Project Wiki (xzcat and dd). (After having made sure the 16GM memory was without partitions, just free space)

My issue, that I don’t know for sure is an actual issue because I’m unfamiliar with LVM, is that looking at the flashed USB in gnome disks, on the 16GB flash stick there’s, from the left:

  • a 630MB FAT16 partition (boot)
  • a 1,1GB XFS partition
  • a 5,8GB LVM2 PV partition
  • and furthest to the right 8,5GB free space. This is more or less reflected when the Pi boots into the system, at least df says so.

I saw Reclaim hard-drive space with LVM - Fedora Magazine but it says

Confirm the system uses LVM with the gnome-disks application, and make sure there is free space available in some other volume. Without space to reclaim from another volume, this guide isn’t useful

"Some other LVM volume I guess and physically unclaimed space on the disk isn’t a volume so I don’t think this guide is useful. Perhaps LVM always likes to keep unclaimed space on its physical partition …but maybe not? I looked at the 16GB flash drive in blivet-gui and there’s “sdf”, the flash drive, with the three parts and the free space that gnome disks sees (none can be resized); then there’s “zram0”, which is 8GB of “type: free space”, then under LVM there’s “fedora_fedora”, “lvm2 VG”, type lvmlv and format xfs, and the size is 5.41GB. One can select “resize” but a message appears saying it isn’t resizable.

Logically this would seem like
A. I need to read up on LVM because I’m missing crucial, basic bits
B. There’s something off with my USB stick (it had raspbian “Stretch” prior, no LVM and space acted like I’ve been used to)
C. There’s some other configuration option regarding the Fedora server image that I need to become aware of

Many thanks for any hints :slight_smile:

P.s : ‘zramctl’ says disk size: 1GB, which is the size of the rpi3 model I have’s RAM, which appears appropriate. I’m not sure why blivet-gui has that volume it calls ‘zram0’ and says is 8gb of free space. Edit2…ah, that’s probably my main machine’s zram : )

Edit3. For reference I cleared the 16GB flash drive and flashed the latest Raspbian lite, the procedure is the same and it seems to boot up the first time much the same, except that it performs a “resizing” procedure the first time the system boots and after that there’s very little unclaimed space on the 16GB drive. I suppose I’d like to make Fedora server accomplish the same.

Well, if anyone throws an exception over the same thing, do read the entire Architectures/ARM/Raspberry Pi - Fedora Project Wiki . I too quickly glanced over the parameters possible for the arm-image-installer and then copied and edited the example. The missed param was --resizefs

1 Like