Boot time creation of mapped devices =================================== It is possible to configure a device mapper device to act as the root device for your system in two ways. The first is to build an initial ramdisk which boots to a minimal userspace which configures the device, then pivot_root(8) in to it. For simple device mapper configurations, it is possible to boot directly using the following kernel command line: dm="<name> <uuid> <ro>,table line 1,...,table line n" name = the name to associate with the device after boot, udev, if used, will use that name to label the device node. uuid = may be 'none' or the UUID desired for the device. ro = may be "ro" or "rw". If "ro", the device and device table will be marked read-only. Each table line may be as normal when using the dmsetup tool except for two variations: 1. Any use of commas will be interpreted as a newline 2. Quotation marks cannot be escaped and cannot be used without terminating the dm= argument. Unless renamed by udev, the device node created will be dm-0 as the first minor number for the device-mapper is used during early creation. Example ======= - Booting to a linear array made up of user-mode linux block devices: dm="lroot none 0, 0 4096 linear 98:16 0, 4096 4096 linear 98:32 0" \ root=/dev/dm-0 Will boot to a rw dm-linear target of 8192 sectors split across two block devices identified by their major:minor numbers. After boot, udev will rename this target to /dev/mapper/lroot (depending on the rules). No uuid was assigned.