On Thursday 06 August 2015 12:09:20 Jeremi Piotrowski wrote: > 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.
I'm part-way through a VM installation, and when I ran btrfs balance it told me it had "moved 6 out of 6 chunks" so I guess it does have an effect. --->8 > > 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). The arrangement I have in mind is sd[ab]1 raid-1 /boot, sd[ab]2 swap, sd[ab]3 rescue system, sd[ab]4 btrfs gentoo. Maybe I could get away without swap since this box has 16GB RAM, but I'm not ready to do without my rescue system. > 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. I'll let you know when I've finished building the VM and tried to boot it. Thanks for your help. -- Rgds Peter
