Its been a while since I have manually had to install Gentoo on a host, as we use our own custom Gentoo build called “fatboy”. Since I had no cd at the time. I figured I’d give the manual route a go which I haven’t since gentoo’s 2005 release. So I give you a brief description of how to get lvm under a live cd working whilst building gentoo.
If you’re using a live environment you’d probably want to install lvm2, Well if your gonna use it anyway. Once installed run the command “modprobe dm-mod” to load the appropriate kernel module.
modprobe dm-mod
We’ll execute a vgscan to scan all disks for volume groups, rebuild caches and will return to any volume groups found. We then activate any existing volgroups (if any) with vgchange.
vgchange -a y
vgchange activates and makes available “-a” the volume groups. The vgchange tool is commonly used to activate and de-activate volume groups but also yields a plethora of other capabilities. I didn’t have any volume groups since this was a fresh install.
My partition layout looks as follows:
boot 100Mb root 900Mb swap 512Mb usr 10Gb tmp 1Gb var 5Gb home 5Gb
Use fdisk and create a partition based on what you want, but if you’re gonna use lvm make sure you leave an appropriate segment for your volume group depending on what you’ve chosen.
I created three partitions using fdisk. One for boot, swap and the last to be used for lvm.
So I ended up with the following:
/dev/hda1 boot /dev/hda2 swap /dev/hda3 for use by lvm,
To initialize the 3rd partition of this drive for lvm we use the command pvcreate.
pvcreate /dev/hda3
If you intend using more that one partition or drive and you want to extend it over different partitions, you can seperate the arguments with a space and initialize it like so:
pvcreate /dev/firstdevice /dev/seconddevice vgcreate volgrp /dev/sda3
The vgcreate command will create us a volume group with the name volgrp on our partition we chosen to use for lvm.
So now we create our logical volumes using a tool called lvcreate and name them accordingly.
lvcreate -L900M -nroot volgrp lvcreate -L10G -nusr volgrp lvcreate -L1G -ntmp volgrp lvcreate -L5G -nvar volgrp lvcreate -L5G -nhome volgrp
As you may notice the -L option takes the size as an argument, the -n option for the name and the last argument being the volume group on which you would like create your logical volume.
If we do a lvscan it’ll now show us the active logical volumes we’ve just created, alternative you could run lvdisplay as it displays the atrributes and various other information about our logical volumes.
Now we’ll have to create our directories to which we’ll build our gentoo environment, The gentoo hand uses /mnt/gentoo, so we’ll use it too. So we create a directory called gentoo in /mnt. Before we continue creating mount points for our logical volumes we’ll need to create filesystems on for our logical volumes and partitions and mount the root partition first. We do this by using the e2fsprogs utilities and since I am going to use ext3 for all my partitions aside from boot I can do the following.
for i in /dev/volgrp/* ; do mke2fs -j $i ; done
This will create ext3 filesystems for all my logical volumes. The only outstanding partitions are swap and boot for which I do the following.
mke2fs /dev/hda1 mkswap /dev/hda2
Now we’re ready to create our mount points and mount our filesytems.
We mount root first then create our mount points of course.
mount /dev/volgrp/root /mnt/gentoo
for i in boot usr tmp var home ; do mkdir /mnt/gentoo/${i} ; done
We mount boot.
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
We mount the rest of our filesytems and activate our swap partition.
for i in usr tmp var home ; do mount /dev/volgrp/${i} /mnt/gentoo/${i}
From here on out its safe to follow the gentoo handbook at chapter 5 and just do the regular download and unpack of stage3 tarballs and the latest portage snapshot which you can find on your local gentoo mirror.
However,
When you mount your /proc filesystem you should rather use the bind option.
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc
Also, before you reboot you might wana de-activate your volume groups with vgchange.
vgachange -a -n
Make sure that when you compile your kernel you compile it with device mapper support, and edit your fstab correctly.
**Update**
I forgot to mention that you’ll probably need to create an initrd image if your root partition is an logical volume.
A useful script to do this can be found here.
The syntax for the script is as follows.
sh lvm2create_initrd -M gentoo
or tell it to look for a specific kernel
sh lvm2create_initrd -M gentoo 2.6.25-gentoo-r7
