As a Linux enthusiast and Gentoo user I was always looking for the perfect boot experience. While I managed to boot my kernel with EFI and grub 2 (as described in my wiki), I still had some troubles with OpenRC playing nice with my LVM-only setup initialized by dracut. Tonight I finally figured out the missing configuration pieces to shut up all warnings on system init.
Initial situation
All my Linux partitions are stored in a single LVM volume group, to stay as flexible as possible:
merkur ~ # lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
[...]
└─sda5 8:5 0 49.5G 0 part
├─vg_merkur-slash (dm-0) 253:0 0 2.5G 0 lvm /
├─vg_merkur-boot (dm-1) 253:1 0 200M 0 lvm /boot
├─vg_merkur-tmp (dm-2) 253:2 0 6G 0 lvm /tmp
├─vg_merkur-swap (dm-3) 253:3 0 4G 0 lvm [SWAP]
├─vg_merkur-var (dm-4) 253:4 0 4G 0 lvm /var
├─vg_merkur-usr (dm-5) 253:5 0 12.8G 0 lvm /usr
└─vg_merkur-opt (dm-6) 253:6 0 8G 0 lvm /opt
My boot toolset currently consists of grub-2.00-r1, kernel-3.6.4, dracut-024, lvm-2.02.95-r4 and openrc-0.11.2
Kernel Configuration
Before compiling the kernel, make sure to include all the required configurations. For this setup, the most important ones are:
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS
CONFIG_MODULES
CONFIG_SYSVIPC
Dracut Configuration
Before installing dracut, the desired modules have to be configured in /etc/make.conf. :
DRACUT_MODULES="caps lvm mdraid syslog"
For this setup at least the “lvm” module is mandatory. Further dracut was built with the “device-mapper” USE flag enabled.
Altough some Linux developers (especially from Red Hat/Fedora) advice against a separate /usr partition because of many boot time dependencies on this system path, I didn’t bother much to change my years old setup. Since version 014, dracut includes a module to fill this gap (/usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/98usrmount/mount-usr.sh). It simply mounts the /usr partition right after the root file system early in the boot process. Therefore we have to make sure that the dracut modules “usrmount” and “lvm” are included in the initramfs, which was possible without any manual modification of /etc/dracut.conf, when generating the boot image with:
dracut -H
Kernel Command Line Configuration
Dracut runtime parameters are given on the kernel command line in the Grub configuration. To automatically enable the LVM Volume Group and spawning a debug shell in case the boot should fail, I added the following parameters in grub:
root=/dev/vg_merkur/slash rd.lvm.vg=vg_merkur rd.shell
LVM Configuration
Since dracut is now responsible to enable our volume group, the corresponding init script has to be disabled:
rc-update del lvm boot
Fsck and Fstab
When booting the system now, the /etc/init.d/fsck script will complain that it cannot check the file systems which are already mounted. Fortunately, the init script allows us to define that fsck should be only run when specific “fs_passno” values are set. I therefore this value to “1” for the file systems which are mounted by dracut and to “2” for all the file systems which should be checked by OpenRC. Take care, when specifying a value of “0”, the file system will be never checked for consistency:
# [fs] [mountpoint] [type] [opts] [dump/pass]
/dev/vg_merkur/boot /boot ext2 noatime,nosuid,nodev 0 2
/dev/vg_merkur/slash / ext4 noatime,discard 0 1
/dev/vg_merkur/usr /usr ext4 noatime,discard,nodev 0 1
/dev/vg_merkur/var /var ext4 noatime,discard,nosuid,nodev 0 2
/dev/vg_merkur/opt /opt ext4 noatime,discard,nosuid,nodev 0 2
/dev/vg_merkur/tmp /tmp ext4 noatime,discard,nosuid,nodev 0 2
/dev/vg_merkur/swap none swap sw 0 0
In /etc/conf.d/fsck we then can define, that the fsck init script should only care about file systems with a “fs_passno” larger than “1”:
fsck_passno=">1"
That’s it… If you have some questions or hints, please leave a comment.
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