Partitioning (LUKS)

LVM on LUKS

LVM on LUKS has the benefit of being able to encrypt an entire drive (useful for laptops with encrypted swap for resume). The LVM container cannot, however, span multiple disks.

List disks with fdisk -l to determine your drive Partition the drive with cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1 (assuming /dev/nvme0n1 is your disk) Partition with the following scheme FS Type Size Mount Point Comment vfat 1G /boot EFI System LUKS (remaining) Linux file system Format the ESP:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

Create the LUKS container:

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2

Enter a passphrase for the LUKS container (don't forget it!!) Open the newly created LUKS container (using cryptlvm as an example mapper name, choose whatever you want):

cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptlvm

Create an LVM physical volume inside LUKS container:

pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm

Create the volume group:

vgcreate vg0 /dev/mapper/cryptlvm

Create the logical volumes (when using resume, make lv_swap as large as RAM):

lvcreate -L 16G -n lv_swap vg0
lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n lv_root vg0

Create partitions

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1        # EFI System Partition
mkfs.btrfs /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root   # Btrfs root volume

Create Btrfs subvolumes

# First, mount Btrfs root volume
mount /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root /mnt

# Create subvolumes
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@log
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@pkg

Mount partitions

# Unmount Btrfs root volume
umount -R /mnt

# Mount main Btrfs subvolume
mount /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root -o noatime,compress-force=zstd,space_cache=v2,subvol=@ /mnt

# Create directories for other mount points
mkdir -p /mnt/{boot,home,var/log,var/cache/pacman/pkg}

# Mount EFI System Partition
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

# Mount remaining Btrfs subvolumes
mount /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root -o noatime,compress-force=zstd,space_cache=v2,subvol=@home /mnt/home
mount /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root -o noatime,compress-force=zstd,space_cache=v2,subvol=@log /mnt/var/log
mount /dev/mapper/vg0-lv_root -o noatime,compress-force=zstd,space_cache=v2,subvol=@pkg /mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg