Hello Qubes Community,
I am curious about what necessary role, if any, drive partitioning has in Qubes OS. I understand that the Qubes OS default installation, as well as the custom installation guide, partitions the drive during installation. I also understand that partitionless (or “superfloppy”) installations of operating systems are possible and that some people do so when the drive will host only one operating system, as is the recommended use case with Qubes OS. Is partitioning actually needed for Qubes OS to function with all its features, or can a partitionless setup be a safe configuration?
I know that in order for UEFI boot to work, an EFI system partition is mandatory. If the EFI partition is stored on a separate flash drive (along with /boot) that is used to boot the computer, however, will that allow a partitionless installation to still benefit from UEFI boot? If so, then what else might prevent a successful partitionless setup, or otherwise make such a setup inadvisable?
To visualize what I mean, this is the default installation scheme, as depicted here:
NAME SIZE TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda disk
├──sda1 1G part /boot
└──sda2 part
└──luks-<UUID> crypt
├──qubes_dom0-pool00_tmeta lvm
├──qubes_dom0-pool00_tdata lvm
└──qubes_dom0-swap lvm [SWAP]
This is an example of a partitionless setup:
NAME SIZE TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda disk
└──luks-<UUID> crypt
├──qubes_dom0-pool00_tmeta lvm
├──qubes_dom0-pool00_tdata lvm
└──qubes_dom0-swap lvm [SWAP]
sdb
├──EFI 500M lvm EFI
└──/boot 1G lvm /boot
Apologies if this is a newbie question. I am new to Qubes OS and custom installations, and I am still getting a grasp of the basics here.
Thanks,
John
