Translations:LVM/129/en

Recent versions of LVM2 (2.02.89) support "thin" volumes. Thin volumes are to block devices what sparse files are to file systems. Thus, a thin logical volume within a pool can be "over-committed": its presented size can be larger than the allocated size - it can even be larger than the pool itself. Just like a sparse file, the extents are allocated as the block device gets populated. If the file system has discard support extents are freed again as files are removed, reducing space utilization of the pool.