Arch Linux

cdysthe

Member

Registered: 2009-11-20

Posts: 62

Installing Arch on a large btrfs partition with two sub volumes.

Hi,

I am going to install Arch on a laptop which has a large btrfs partition with two sub volumes / and /home (in addition to a swap partition). Both btrfs volumes are compressed (lzo). I would like to keep /home untouched with all it's date and install on /. Will that be possible?

nagaseiori

Member

Registered: 2012-09-22

Posts: 72

Re: Installing Arch on a large btrfs partition with two sub volumes.

Definitely possible. I have btrfs on a luks volume on lvm, which also contains my /boot and swap partitions. I have / (root) and /home on separate btrfs subvolumes.

cdysthe

Member

Registered: 2009-11-20

Posts: 62

Re: Installing Arch on a large btrfs partition with two sub volumes.

Thank you. Good to know. Will the installer work with such a setup?

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Installing Arch on a large btrfs partition with two sub volumes.

Thank you. Good to know. Will the installer work with such a setup?

Considering that you are the installer, yes this will work.  When you get to the part about making partitions, just make one large btrfs partition and then create the necessary subvolumes.  Then unmount the filesystem and then mount each using the subvol=/path/to/subvol.

For example, if you were to make a rootfs and a home subvol, then you would likely have /rootfs and /home relative to the very start of the btrfs filesystem.  So you would then do:

# mount -o subvol=rootfs /dev/sdXY /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/home
#mount -o subvol=home /dev/sdXY /mnt/home