Todo - as-yet untested

This concept and these notes are entirely obsoleted by dm-crypt, if you want a complete encryption solution.

• Logical volume management

• Logical Volume Manager (Linux)

These notes were made from instructions from Slackware as of Slackware 14.2 64bit.

It's remarkably simple.

Thanks to http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/README_LVM.TXT

• https://wiki.debian.org/LVM#Labels

Partitioning ∞

fdisk or cfdisk are available on Slackware's install media.

• Create a large partition which will become your LVM Volume Group. Perhaps you will use one big partition that takes up a whole disk.

  • See Partition Alignment for the advanced user, although as of this writing (2016-11-04) things seem to either be automatic or "good enough" for an everyday user.
  • Set this partition's type to 8e (Linux LVM).

LVM setup ∞

Here is a suggested layout:

physical_volume=/dev/sdx1
volume_group=myvg

pvcreate                 $physical_volume
vgcreate  $volume_group  $physical_volume
lvcreate  -L 15G       -n root  $volume_group
lvcreate  -L 4G        -n home  $volume_group
lvcreate  -L 4G        -n swap  $volume_group
lvcreate  -L 100%FREE  -n data  $volume_group
mkswap /dev/$volume_group/swap

More advanced users might make targets for /usr, /etc and perhaps /var.

Slackware's setup ∞

• Run Slackware's setup

• Select your various LVM targets

  • root for /
  • home for /home
  • swap for your swap
  • data mounted perhaps at /data

• Proceed with configuring your LILO as usual, and select /dev/myvg/root as your root filesystem to boot.

  • If LILO generates warnings or errors, ignore them in this step.

• Complete your use of Slackware's setup, but do not reboot yet!

mkinitrd ∞

• First enter a chroot:

chroot  /mnt

• The next step can be done the easy way with:

/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -r

.. if it looks good, you can execute it like:

$( /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -r )

# mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.14-smp -m ext4 -f ext4 -r /dev/myvg/root -L

filesystem=ext4       # Or perhaps you use btrfs
kernel='4.4.14-smp'   # The default Slackware 14.2 SMP kernel
volume_group=myvg

mkinitrd  -c  -k $kernel  -m $filesystem  -f $filesystem  -r /dev/$volume_group/root  -L

mkinitrd  -c  -k $kernel  -m $filesystem  -f $filesystem  -r /dev/myvg/root  -L  -l nl

Configure LILO ∞

(LILO)

• Edit /etc/lilo.conf

  • Nano is not available. You'll have to use vi. Ugh.

• Look for "Linux bootable partition config"

  • Add a line for the initrd.
  • Change the filename of the kernel to be used. We will need to use a generic kernel.

It should look somewhat like this:

  image = /boot/vmlinuz-generic-smp-4.4.14-smp
    initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
    root = /dev/myvg/root
    label = linux
    read-only

• When satisfied, save the changes to this file.

• Run lilo while still in the chroot.

  • Lilo will issue a couple of warnings concerning a difference in what /proc/partitions reports and what lilo thinks are available partitions, but it is safe to ignore these.

• Exit the chroot:

exit

• Reboot

You are done!