"Updating database of binaries" step very slow under Yosemite?

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Oct 22, 2014, at 6:42 PM, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday October 22 2014 18:00:29 Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
>  
>> For instance, the boot volume is converted to a Core Storage logical volume on upgrade.
>  
> I know it's off-topic, but what on earth does that mean?

In an oversimplified nutshell, logical volume management (LVM) divorces physical storage from its logical representation. This lets you do clever and useful things like present multiple drives as a single volume, or implement snapshots using copy-on-write techniques. (Multiple partitions on a single physical disk can be thought of as a very primitive form of LVM.)

Core Storage is Apple's private implementation of LVM. They currently use it to implement Fusion Drive (HDD+SSD masquerading as one volume) and FileVault 2 (full-disk encryption), and maybe other things I'm not aware of.

In at least some cases, the Yosemite installer wraps HFS+ volumes up into a Core Storage Logical Volume Group, and they become Core Storage Logical Volumes.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/2/#diskutil-list

vq