Hello Aaron On Thursday 31 July 2014 08:44:28 Aaron Hall wrote: > But if after this error, I go into a shell and "chroot /target", I can > run "grub-install /dev/sda" and that works: the installed system boots > fine off the LVM. If we set up root or /boot as a traditional physical > partition, this does not happen.
Aside from possible bugs in setup-storage: My advice would be to always reserve a physical partition for boot and swap. For /boot it's just about principle of least surprise and keep all configurations as similar as possible. (root on LVM does not require separate boot partition, root on encrypted LVM requires /boot, root on LVM on GPT may require separate partition, root on btrfs - who knows?) I cannot be bothered to RTFM for each combination of msdos/gpt/md/lvm so I prefere to always configure a separate /boot. Separate swap partition avoids a deadlock if the memory is exhausted. At least in the past it was possible for the kernel to deadlock itself if swap was placed on LVM. It was roughly like this: 1) I need some memory. 2) Free memory is exhausted. I need to free some memory first. 3) I need to allocate some pages for swapping out memory. 4) swap needs to write data 5) LVM needs some memory to manage the swap LV 6) proceed with 1) I do not know if the bug still exists. (Maybe it's not even fixable?) Just to be sure I always configure at least one physical swap partition. > disk_config sda > primary /boot 300 ext4 rw > primary - 0- - - > disk_config lvm > vg VolGroup00 sda2 > VolGroup00-LVroot / 4096 ext4 rw > VolGroup00-LVswap swap 2048 swap sw > VolGroup00-LVusr /usr 4096 ext4 rw > VolGroup00-LVvar /var 4096 ext4 rw > Are we doing something wrong? We're still not sure we're using > setup-storage correctly. Looks fine to me. You could improve the config a bit by using align-at:4KiB to disk_config sda to avoid a misalignment between partition layout and the underlying device geometry. disk_config sda align-at:4KiB primary /boot 300MiB ext4 rw primary swap 2GiB swap sw primary - 12GiB- - - disk_config lvm vg VolGroup00 sda3 VolGroup00-LVroot / 4GiB ext4 rw VolGroup00-LVusr /usr 4GiB ext4 rw,nodev VolGroup00-LVvar /var 4GiB ext4 rw,nodev (I also replaced all raw numbers with appropriate units and configured the correct minimum size for the LVM PV. Additional tip: if this is a VM configure /tmp and optionally /var/tmp as tmpfs devices to improve performance.) tschüß thomas
