Tuesday, 24 December 2019

SLES 15 LVM + XFS Without Separate /boot Partition

GRUB2 allow booting from LVM partition, however I haven't see any documentation on how to setup SLES 15 using LVM + XFS root partition without separate /boot partition. You can even put /boot as one of the logical volume.

When separate /boot partition is not created, we will need to create small partition with BIOS boot flag and once this BIOS boot partition is created, you can setup the remaining disk as LVM partition and setup your volume group and logical volumes as usual.   

During the installation, choose "Expert Partitioner" > "Start with Existing Partitions".


Select your disk and "Create New Partition Table" > "GPT"


Select "Partitions" tab and choose "Add Partition"


Choose "Custom Size" then enter "8 MiB" as the size. The Role of this partition should be "Raw Volume (unformatted)"

Select BIOS Boot as Partition ID


Create another partition as LVM partition and setup your LVM as usual. In this tutorial I am creating "system" VG with "boot", "root", and "swap" LV.


Proceed with the installation as usual. Once the installation complete, you should have SLES 15 with all mount points inside LVM + XFS. 



That's all for today notes. Have fun trying!!!

Cheers






1 comment:

  1. Hi David, just wondering what are the reasons for your decision to do XFS on LVM2 rather than the default BTRFS for the system disk? This is RHEL style.

    I find that the YAST2 installer gets in the way of partitioning and creating file systems. My own method, is to boot using the rescue mode to create the partitions at the exact sector address, then do the mkfs with all my own options. This way the disk layout and file system settings are exactly as i want them to be. I use YAST2 installer to do the GRUB installation as well as the packages.

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