On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Peter Humphrey wrote: > First, btrfs balance. I had no idea that was needed, so of course I didn't > include it in my attempts. Could that be why, on booting, the kernel couldn't > mount the file system?
I don't think that balancing an empty btrfs filesystem is necessary. It should have no effect at this point and would not affect the kernel's ability to mount the btrfs volume. > Second, --xattrs on the tarball extraction. I haven't seen this recommended > before, and I wonder what extra attributes are needed for btrfs. This is part of the normal installation procedure and is not specific to btrfs. See [1]. For all I know this has always been part of the installation. > Third, why do you do your kernel compiling in /var/tmp/linux? It seems like > extra work and I can't see a reason for it. The kernel developers recommend to __never__ compile the kernel as root. You never know when something like `rm -rf /` might creep into the Makefile ;) The portage unpacked kernel sources belong to root:root so Rich's method compiles them in /var/tmp/linux which can be done as the local user. > Finally, can I assume that your procedure would work just as well installing > into, say, /dev/sd[ab]4? Yep, but as stated by Rich there isn't much to a btrfs raid 1 install aside from mkfs.btrfs, building btrfs support into the kernel, the slightly different fstab entry, and using an initramfs (dracut makes it easy). I do recommend that you try it in a virtual machine first. With an initramfs it worked out of the box for me but I wasn't able to get it to work with just the kernel command line. [1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Unpacking_the_stage_tarball
