Re: [gentoo-user] grub and what happens exactly when booting.

[Gregory Shearman]

In linux.gentoo.user, Dale wrote:
>
> I'm getting this LVM thing down pat tho.
>
> cfdisk to create partitions, if not using the whole drive.
> pvcreate
> vgcreate
> lvcreate
> then put on a file system and mount.

Sounds good.

> I still get them confused as to what comes first but I got some pictures
> to look at now.  That helps to picture what I am doing, sort of.

pv = physical volume. Physical comes first.

vg = volume group. LVM volumes MUST belong to a group.

lv = logical volume. Logical obviously comes last.

> Thanks to all for the advice tho.  It's helping.  Still nervous about /
> on LVM tho.  :/

If you're nervous then don't do it. I've had my root filesystem on LVM
for years on a number of different machines and never had a problem.
I've used Genkernel's initramfs generator to create my initramfs, but
I've just unmasked dracut and I've begun testing it on my system. It
looks good so far, except that dracut mounts something on my nonexistent
/run directory. This caused a warning when displaying mounted
filesystems using "df" about /run not existing. I'm wondering whether I
can just add the directory or do I need to do something special such as
add a ".keep" file to it.

If you want to go ahead with root on LVM then leave a duplicate root
partition in a normal linux partition until you're satisfied, or backup
your root partition to another machine or disk drive. You should be
backing up your system anyway. My root filesystem on my laptop is only
161MB. Of course I've got a separate /usr and /var filesystem, which is
the reason for my testing of dracut. I want to be ahead of the game when
these forced udev changes become mandatory.

I'm not happy about the decision to make /usr necessary for udev to
populate /dev, but I've used an initramfs for years so it's not such a
wrench for as it for other gentoo users.

-- 
Regards,
Gregory.