I’m on the way to reinstall my laptop from scratch (64GB RAM, 3 SSDs each with 2TB) as my system broke down during in place upgrade to R4.3rc2.
When I do the default installation, Qubes takes the disks into a raid1 array, but I can’t find out, which way this is done.
What is the order of the installation steps?
a) partitioning
b) encrypting
c) combining to raid
d) formatting
As I understand the order of a), b) and c) can be changed, depending on the used drivers and kernel modules (lvm, lvraid or dmraid, luks encryption) with different implications on speed and security.
My goal is to use the disks in a raid5 array, as I’ve got plenty of space, speed and security are more important than having the complete space available.
To stay most near to the official installation, I would like to use the Qubes way to prepare the disks. In this case the “only” difference would be the raid level.
May anyone tell me, where to find the single installation steps under the hood of the Qubes R4.3 installation?
I’ve read all three articles already before posting my question.
Btrfs is not what I want, why those two articles are only useful as additional background knowledge.
The guide for the custom installation mentions the disk preparation tasks for one disk only. The part for two or more disks is not explained, but it is not trivial, as some of the needed commands are mutual exclusive.
I was able to build a raid5, but later wether the installer nor me was able to use this raid to create the thin pool on this raid5 for example.
The installer is able to work with more than one drive and creates something like a raid0 during automated installation.
What I want to know is, what the installer is doing to reach this raid 1. My idea is to exchange the part for the creation of raid1 with a similar procedure for a raid5.
Most probably it’s a nested lvm configuration, but as there are many ways to do this, I need to know the Qubes’ way …
To be a bit more exact: There’s something between steps 3 and 7, what has to be done to combine the single disks to this raid array. This is what I need to know.
AFAIK, the installer is not Qubes specific at this point, it is a standard Fedora installer, where you should select custom/manual partitioning, and customise your disk usage according your needs:
Are you sure it’s not your BIOS who defined the raid?
I did many installation where I had multiple disk in the PC, but never seen any ‘automatic’ raid setup so far…
The GUI installer seems to react on selecting more than one disk.
Maybe it just appends those disks with LVM, what would result in a raid0 configuration.
For now I’ve found a way to install my system with raid5, but for the moment the management of it seems ugly complicated.
Just for having a solution (even if it’s possibly not a good one) I’m rewriting the guide.
I’ll post it here later.
PS:
Sorry for my mismatching of raid0 and raid1. The gui installer creates a raid0 as it just appends the disks and writes the data most probably with striping on the resulting virtual diskspace.
Raid1 would be mirroring, what it does not.