I'm just looking into orgainsing a Pi with a big disk and plan to use LVM. I expect to find that the root partition needs to be outside any LVM scheme - I thought I'd just ask on here to confirm my thoughts.
The way I boot x86 using root-on-LVM is via an initrd that includes the necessary "lvm2" hook - the way you make an initrd is to use the "mkinitcpio" tool.
What I've discovered via Google and experimentation: The "linux" package is what brings in "mkinitcpio" on x86. On the Rpi, the "linux" package is "linux-raspberrypi" and this does not have mkinitcpio as a dependency (it was actually explicitly removed https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/pull/218). I've also read plenty about people on various distros struggling to use an initrd on the Pi so perhaps it doesn't work anyway and that's the reason for mknintcpio not being used.
So, would anyone more knowledgeable care to share their experience with me? Is it possible to boot the Pi with a root partition that is on an LVM volume ?
(I am talking about the root partition here, I am not including the boot partition in this - that's on the sd card and I know that's where it has to be. I put everything else on another hard-drive connected to the usb.)