Hi,
Hm. I can see your points. But I don't need the flexibility LVM provides, I have enough flexibility through Btrfs. And yeah, it's readily automated, and that's indeed practical for many people. Personally, I'd rather modify the start-up process a tiny bit so that GPT inside LUKS gets parsed. I just try to strip off unnecessary 'overhead' / layers of my system. Okay, then.
Here's my opinion on this approach.
If you have 8 GiB or more and not hibernating, don't bother with swap, it'd be a waste of disk space. In that case you could just put a btrfs volume straight on the LUKS container without the GPT. Problem solved as you don't need any more volume management than opening LUKS containers.
Otherwise WITH swap: Unfortunately btrfs (still) doesn't support swap files properly, otherwise I'd suggest using them. You can write a custom hook. Unless you plan to share it, I'd make it a dead simple shell script that simply reruns the command to scan for added GPT partitions for your specific setup. Make sure you have a setup hook that gets the dependencies in there.
Personally, I still think you should just use LVM, for the simple reason you're having trouble with GPT, which is not meant for being used like this, since it can work as a more flexible "partition table" inside the LUKS container and is better supported all around. btrfs really doesn't act as a good replacement for logical volumes, in my experience. Having something with more features than you need is better than trying to coerce something into working ways it's not really intended.
Thanks for your input! I've reconsidered LVM twice now but still feel better without it. Cheers, Merlin -- Merlin Büge <toni@bluenox07.de>