The LVM Configuration Files

LVM supports multiple configuration files. At system startup, the lvm.conf configuration file is loaded from the directory specified by the environment variable LVM_SYSTEM_DIR, which is set to /etc/lvm by default.

The lvm.conf file can specify additional configuration files to load. Settings in later files override settings from earlier ones. To display the settings in use after loading all the configuration files, execute the lvm dumpconfig command.

For information on loading additional configuration files, see Section C.2, “Host Tags”.

B.1. The LVM Configuration Files

The following files are used for LVM configuration:

/etc/lvm/lvm.conf: Central configuration file read by the tools.
etc/lvm/lvm_hosttag.conf: For each host tag, an extra configuration file is read if it exists: lvm_hosttag.conf. If that file defines new tags, then further configuration files will be appended to the list of tiles to read in. For information on host tags, see Section C.2, “Host Tags”.

In addition to the LVM configuration files, a system running LVM includes the following files that affect LVM system setup:

/etc/lvm/.cache: Device name filter cache file (configurable).
/etc/lvm/backup/: Directory for automatic volume group metadata backups (configurable).
/etc/lvm/archive/: Directory for automatic volume group metadata archives (configurable with regard to directory path and archive history depth).
/var/lock/lvm/: In single-host configuration, lock files to prevent parallel tool runs from corrupting the metadata; in a cluster, cluster-wide DLM is used.