2.8. Activating EVMS volumes

In the previous EVMS design (releases 1.2.1 and earlier), volume discovery was performed in the kernel, and all volumes were immediately activated at boot time. With the current EVMS design, volume discovery is performed in user-space, and volumes are activated by communicating with the kernel. Thus, in order to activate your volumes, you must open one of the EVMS user interfaces and perform a save, which will activate all inactive volumes.

For example, start the GUI by running evmsgui. You should see all empty checkboxes in the "Active" column. Press Save, which activates all of the volumes and fills in each of the checkboxes.

In addition to manually starting one of the EVMS user interfaces, there is a new utility called evms_activate. The evms_activate utility simply opens the EVMS Engine and issues a commit command. You might want to add a call to evms_activate to your boot scripts in order to automatically activate your volumes at boot time. If you have volumes listed in your /etc/fstab file, you need to call evms_activate before the fstab is processed.

	NOTE
	EVMS requires /proc to be mounted in order to find the Device Mapper driver. If you run evms_activate before processing the fstab file, you might need to manually mount and unmount /proc around the call to evms_activate.

After the volumes are activated, you can mount them in the normal way with the dev-nodes in the /dev/evms directory.