Arch Linux

jamdox

Member

Registered: 2015-05-02

Posts: 46

btrfs subvolume schemes for easier management

Well I'm having some sleep/wake issues on my chromebook, troubleshooting which requires some messing with kernel commandline options, so I've been wanting to do the following:

Right now I have a a btrfs filesystem on a logical volume on an encrypted partition, i.e. the "lvm on luks" setup described in the wiki.

Since I like trying different softwares I decided back during initial install to have a "base" install, make subvolume snapshots of it, boot into those and install my full desktop and everything in those.

The main problem with this is that the /boot folders are out of sync.  Booting always gives an "error, sparse files not supported" (not exact) message which seems normal, but I notice that if I update linux on the main volume but not on a subvolume I'll have trouble further in the boot process, which may or may not have anything to do with anything.

Basically I feel the need to keep my /boot folder synchronized across snapshots, so I was thinking of doing to it what I did with my home directory, snapshotting it and telling fstab to mount the subvolume, so that it stays the same no matter which snapshot of the root directory I boot into.

I'm curious if people think this is a good idea or have other suggestions.  I'm also thinking of doing something similar with /etc or maybe just /etc/grub.d, since this is the really annoying thing I feel the need to keep synchronized.  Obviously booting into snapshots means some extensive custom grub options and having to manually sync them between snapshots is a pain.

jamdox

Member

Registered: 2015-05-02

Posts: 46

Re: btrfs subvolume schemes for easier management

I think I'm going to go ahead with making a boot subvolume.  Instead of making a subvolume for /etc I'm making a /boot/etc directory for things like grub.d and mkinitcpio.conf and will symlink these into /etc.

Wish me luck.

ratcheer

Member

Registered: 2011-10-09

Posts: 912

Re: btrfs subvolume schemes for easier management

Good luck!

Tim