documentation/docs/alpine-desktop-setup/provisioning.md

Provisioning

After flasing the Alpine Linux extended ISO, partition a disk. For this action internet is required since gptfdisk is not included on the extended ISO, therefore it needs to be obtained from the repository.

To set it up setup-interfaces and setup-apkrepos will be used.

# setup-interfaces -ar
# setup-apkrepos -c1

A few packages will have to be installed first:

# apk add e2fsprogs cryptsetup lvm2 lsblk sgdisk wipefs dosfstools acpid

Wipe the existing disk partitions

# wipefs -a /dev/<disk>
# sgdisk --zap-all /dev/<disk>

Create on the disk an EFI system partition (ESP) and a Linux filesystem partition

# sgdisk -n 1:1m:+512m -t 1:ef00 /dev/<disk>
# sgdisk -n 2:0:-10m -t 2:8300 /dev/<disk>

Reload the device nodes

# mdev -s

Then, format the ESP with a FAT32 filesystem

# mkfs.fat -F 32 -n esp /dev/<disk>1

Volume group creation

The root partition of the system is going to be encrypted using cryptsetup. First generate a key that will be used to encrypt the device and save it temporarily to the file /tmp/luks.key with:

# cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 20 | head -n 1 > /tmp/luks.key && cat /tmp/luks.key

Later on in the guide clevis will be used for automatic decryption. So, this key only has to be entered a few times. However, if any changes are made to the BIOS or secure-boot then this key will be needed again, so make sure to write it down.

Then format the partition using cryptsetup:

# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/<disk>2 --type luks2 --cipher aes-xts-plain64 --hash sha512 --iter-time 4000 --key-size 512 --pbkdf argon2id
[Enter the generated key]
# cryptsetup open --type luks /dev/<disk2> luks

Create the LVM volume group

# vgcreate vg /dev/mapper/luks

Then create partitions inside the volume group:

# lvcreate --name alpine_root -L 24G vg
# lvcreate --name home -L <home-quota> vg
# lvcreate --name var -L 16G vg
# lvcreate --name nix -L 32G vg

Setting the <home-quota> depends on the total size of the volume group, generally try to reserve some empty space in the volume group.

Create the filesystems on the logical partitions:

for i in alpine_root home var nix; do
> mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg/$i
> done