Discussion:
[linux-lvm] LVM but no real partitions
Xen
2016-05-06 20:44:47 UTC
Permalink
Did people ever consider whether it was worth being able to start a PV
on a raw physical device with a small offset to reserve room for a boot
sector?

If you could create a PV on a bootdisk with a 2048 sector offset, you
would have a bootable device without partition tables and only LVM.

The same applies to LUKS. If you could put the LUKS header at 2048
sectors, you could boot a disk with nothing but a luks container, since
grub2 understands LUKS.

I guess such a thing would be extremely easy to achieve, it just
wouldn't be portable.

Since you may need to recompile both LUKS and Grub, and possibly even
dm-crypt.

The total number of changes would probably not be more than 10 lines.
Not sure.

Anyway.

Anyone ever fancied a LVM system without real partitions?
Dryden Personalis
2016-05-08 05:09:07 UTC
Permalink
Hi again.

(My developer nick, same address for now).

I've updated the patch from 2013 that enabled Grub to be installable on
a PV using the --bootloaderareasize flag to pvcreate. I have not used
Grub git, but enabled it at least on the source that comes with latest
Ubuntu.

Which is 2.02 beta 2.

Link to post on grub-devel:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2016-05/msg00010.html

Original patch:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2013-09/msg00113.html

I will attach the patch here as well for convenience, if you care.

Regards.

D.

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