Florian Philipp writes:
> I'm building a new Gentoo system (notebook) and want to rearrange a few
> things. I thought it would be good to have the following layout:
>
> - boot on a normal partition
> - root on a normal partition
> - one big encrypted partition (dmcrypt / LUKS)
> - on that partition an LVM volume group
> - on that volume group all stuff not necessary for booting: home, var,
> tmp, etc.
>
> AFAIK, the Gentoo boot process is organized so that LVM gets stated
> before dmcrypt is started. I would need it vice versa.
>
> Is that possible with baselayout-1? Do I need to switch to
> baselayout-2?
I don't know yet if this is possible with baselayout-2. I am using both
methods, but the way you like it had to be hacked a little. Look for the
thread "Self created initramfs cannot work" from June 2009, Dirk Heinrichs
talks about his initfs approach. It's similar to an initramfs, but all the
stuff is simply on the boot partition. It did not work out of the box (for
me), and I never got around to really debug this, but it's sort of
working, and has support for opening LUKS partitions. I think it's a cool
idea, simpler than an initramfs and no need for cpio and its options I
always have to look up. Having the root partition encrypted is also not
problem with this setup.
The advantage is that only one LUKS partiton has to be opened. My desktop
system does it the Gentoo way, but it has 23 encrypted LVMs (nicluding
root), which takes quite a while to open. I made it a lot faster by
opening them all in parallel (addig a & at the right location in
/lib/rcscripts/addons/dm-crypt-start.sh), still it's much longer than with
a single LUKS partition. I don't care much about it as the PC is running
all the time, or uses tuxonice, so I seldomly reboot.
But apart from the longer boot time, I find this approach simpler. Why do
you like it the other way around?
Wonko
