[arch-general] Installation: How to get HDD > LUKS > GPT working in a clean way

[Merlin Büge]

Hi Paul,


> If another opinion helps, I've done some funky disk layouts at various
> times, and I also think that if you need partitioning above the LUKS layer,
> you'd do better to use LVM than GPT. GPT is intended to be used at the
> lowest level of the stack, whereas LVM is well-supported at pretty much any
> level. If you do go ahead with it, double-check that you won't get block
> alignment issues in that stack that could affect IO performance.

Thanks for your input.
(I already checked alignment of my setup.)


> However, if you say that you don't need the flexibility of LVM, I'd
> certainly first try btrfs directly on top of LUKS.

If I did not want to have a swap partition, I'd to that for sure.
Another possible layout which just comes to mind is

  GPT
  +-LUKS
  | +-Btrfs
  +-LUKS
    +-SWAP

I think that should work with hibernation, too, and GPT would be on the right
place + still no LVM :)
Maye I'll just try different layouts over time, haven't experimented much yet.


> Final consideration: if you want GRUB to open a LUKS container and then
> load stage 2 from btrfs, you'll need a decent amount of storage for the
> GRUB 1st stage, which on a traditional setup goes in free space you need
> to account for after the MBR (or on the EFI partition for UEFI setups). In
> your case, as the whole disk is LUKS and you have no partition table, have
> you considered where the GRUB 1st stage will be stored? I use a USB stick
> to boot GRUB stage 1 on my encrypted machines, and that may work for you
> too.

As mentioned in my initial post, I have GRUB2 along with (deblobbed) coreboot
stored in the SPI flash chip (so no BIOS here). It's very convenient :)


Regards,

Merlin



-- 
Merlin Büge <toni at bluenox07.de>