LV (logical volume)
also: LV, logical block device
A logical volume (LV) is a virtual block device created from one or more physical volumes managed by the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It acts like a traditional hard drive partition but offers flexibility in sizing and management.
A logical volume is an abstraction layer that sits between your physical storage devices and the filesystems you create on them. Instead of partitioning a disk directly, LVM lets you combine multiple physical volumes into a volume group, then carve out logical volumes of any size from that pool.
For example, if you have two 1TB drives, you can create a volume group containing both, then create logical volumes like /dev/vg0/home (500GB) and /dev/vg0/var (1.5TB) without worrying about which physical disk they occupy. You can later expand or shrink these volumes, migrate them between drives, or take snapshots—operations impossible with traditional fixed partitions.
Logical volumes are accessed as device files, typically named /dev/volume_group_name/logical_volume_name, and you can format them with any filesystem (ext4, XFS, etc.) just like a regular partition.