Hi,

Yesterday I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop. During partitioning, I had turned on full disk encryption with what was presumably LVM+LUKS. Afterwards, I was shown a screen with all the things I set during partitioning. I noticed only 50 and 8 Gigabytes were allocated to the / and swap partitions respectively. The SSD in my laptop has 120 Gigabytes of storage space available.

Is this loss of space inherent to full disk encryption with LVM+LUKS on GNU/Linux? I had never noticed it before. And if it is, is there anything I can do about it? I also remember leaving a box for Btrfs snapshots checked during the install. If encryption isn't the culprit, could that be it?

Thanks.

Sounds about right - if your machine has 8GB of RAM then an 8GB SWAP partition would be appropriate.

Depending on how many "snapshots" you have, well then, yes, they are going to take up space. I don't understand how you're saying that "because of full disk encryption", that means you lose space.

I'm really not understanding what the problem here is ?

I don't think I formulated my problem right. The problem is that when I have FDE turned off I can use about 110 Gigabytes of my SSD for my / partition, but when I turn it on the system seems to only be able to allocate 50 Gigabytes to my / partition. So my question was where those 60 Gigabytes get "lost" and what I can do about it.

When you say "FDE", I assume you mean "Full disk encryption" ?

What exactly do you mean when you say "when I have FDE turned off I can use about 110 Gigabytes of my SSD for my / partition..." ?

When you encrypt a partition, it's not encrypted when it's mounted. It's only encrypted when it's not mounted. The only way I could think of when you say "turning it off", would be to format the partition and re-format it - thus removing the encryption altogether.

Is that what you're asking ?

Yes.

I meant that when I do a fresh install without turning full disk encryption on, a significantly larger portion of the available space gets allocated to the / partition by the installer. I assumed that everything the installer doesn't allocate to swap it allocates to the / partition when I specify I don't want a seperate /home partition.

Not really. I was asking what happened to the 60 Gigabytes it could allocate to the / partition in an install when I did not "turn on" full disk encryption but it could not allocate to the / partition when I did "turn on" full disk encryption.

It's up to the installation program as to how much space gets allocated to where. YaST (for openSUSE) gives you the option to manually allocate partition sizes as well as a number of other options. While I can't say for sure, it may well be that YaST decides that if you don't select full disk encryption, that you must want a bigger "root" partition. It's certainly something in YaST that's doing it. I can't really say anymore than that.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmm, well I think it's time to fire up YaST again then and see what it is doing, exactly.

Thanks for taking the time to post in this thread.

I just installed OpenSUSE again and the problem, as jsbjsb001 suspected, was YaST. YaST apparently just allocated a small, custom amount of space to the / partition, I just had to set the right amount of storage space for it.

jsbjsb001, I'm marking the thread as solved. Would it make sense to rename it as well?

Well it's up to you if you want to rename the thread, although maybe adding a more descriptive title may help future readers. Up to you.

I would suggest you mark what you have found helpful, so future readers know exactly which of my responses helped.

Done, thanks.

1 members found this post helpful.