markusholtermann
LinuxMarkus Holtermann

LVM on secondary LUKS device

Today I ran into a problem when I set up my new SSD. I have two fully encrypted disks (one SSD and one HDD) and two volume groups (VGs) on top. Each disk has its own VG. I thought about the following partition scheme. sda is the SSD and sdb the HDD:

/dev/sda2            → LUKS → /dev/mapper/luksmain
/dev/sdb1            → LUKS → /dev/mapper/luksdata
/dev/mapper/luksmain → LVM  → /dev/mapper/main
/dev/mapper/luksdata → LVM  → /dev/mapper/data

And from these block devices set up the following file systems:

/dev/mapper/main-root     /
/dev/sda1                 /boot
/dev/mapper/main-home     /home
/dev/mapper/data-var      /var
/dev/mapper/data-music    /home/Music
/dev/mapper/data-videos   /home/Videos
/dev/mapper/main-mysql    /var/lib/mysql

As one can see, the logical volume (LV) data-var is required by the system. It contains e.g. the logs or the package cache.

To use it during startup, enable the lvm-on-luks systemd service:

systemctl enable lvm-on-luks.service