In honor of my recent Sekiro accomplishment, I bought myself a cute little Sekiro letter opener sword to go on my office side desk.

I honestly think I may consider Sekiro the best first player game ever made. It’s by far better than any of From Softwares’ other games (I am a big Dark Souls fan. Elden ring was boringly easy). I had been trying to do a perfect run for about a month and finally got it done.

In 10.5 hours I killed every enemy exactly once (no more, no less), 0 death screens, no cheese, no exiting battles, bought out all vendors, and collected all items. It was a lot of fun.

One of the reasons I love Sekiro so much is that it’s about the zen perfection of a specific skill set, patience, timing, and reaction speed (I am also a big fan of Super Hexagon - almost have a 4 minute run on it). There is no experience grinding to get past bosses, though certain skills acquired through exp are extremely helpful. This makes it harder than dark souls, and winning gives much more of an accomplishment feeling.

It goes far beyond that though. The level design is top notch and art assets are visually stunning. It’s an integrated cohesive world more so than any of the Dark Souls, and I’m a bit of a sucker for Japanese themes.

Combat is wonderful. Pretty much all the fights are fun and fair once you learn how to play, and you can even freaking pause the game! :-D You have to keep on your toes at all times cause ANYONE can kill you. The game both lets you sneak or just run in and murder everything if you’re good enough. The replayability is much higher than any of the other FromSoft souls like games too.

I recently moved to Linux and have all my hard drives Luks encrypted, including the primary. I decided to convert my ext4 partitions to Btrfs recently, which I’m totally loving. I also decided to grab another nvme drive and use it as a RAID1 (mirror) drive against my primary drive, using Btrfs’ RAID mechanics. Below are the instructions to accomplish this.

Do note that this is for a situation where you already have a BTRFS volume and want to add a device as RAID1. This assumes you already have your system booting to the LUKS encrypted drive with the root being btrfs. Many modern Linux OS installers can do this for you automatically. Parts of these instructions can still be used in other situations.

• Hopefully you also have a swap partition under the same LVM as your LUKS root (the Linux Mint installer does this by default), as we’ll be using it. If not, you’ll need to modify the instructions. This script resizes the swap partition and adds an “extra” partition to hold your drive key. This is required because a drive key cannot be loaded off your btrfs volume as both drives need to be unlocked first.
• This should be ran from another operating system. I would recommend using Universal USB Installer to do this. It allows you to put multiple OS live cds on a USB key, including optional persistence.
• Run the following script as root (you can use sudo). Make sure to fill in the variables section first. Or even better, run the script 1 line at a time to make sure there are no problems.

#!/bin/bash
#-----------------------------------Variables----------------------------------
#Current root drive
CurPart="nvme0n1p3" #The current drive partition in /dev. This example uses nvme disk #0 partition #3
CurCryptVol="vgmint" #What you named your LVM under LUKS
CurCryptRoot="root" #What you named your root partition under the LVM
CurCryptRootSubVol="/" #The path of the subvolume that is used as the root partition. For example, I use “@”
CurCryptSwap="swap_1" #What you named your swap partition under the LVM
CurCryptExtra="extra" #What you WANT to name your extra partition under the LVM
CurCryptExtraSize="100M" #How big you want your extra partition that will hold your key file
CurKeyPath="" #The path to a key file that will unlock both drives. If left blank then one will be created

#New drive
NewDrive="nvme1n1" #The new drive in /dev. This example uses nvme disk #1
NewPart="nvme1n1p3" #The new partition in /dev. You will be creating this with the cfdisk. This example uses nvme disk#1 partition#3
NewCryptName="raid1_crypt" #What we’ll name the root LUKS partition (no LVM)

#Other variables you do not need to set
CurMount="/mnt/primary"
ExtraMountPath="$CurMount/mnt/extra"
BtrfsReleasePath="kdave/btrfs-progs"
BtrfsReleaseFile="btrfs.box.static"
DriveKeyName="drivekey"

echo "---------------------------------Update BTRFS---------------------------------"
echo "Make sure you are using the latest btrfs-progs"
cd "$(dirname "$(which btrfs)")"
LATEST_RELEASE=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/$BtrfsReleasePath/releases/latest" | grep tag_name | cut -d \" -f4)
wget "https://github.com/$BtrfsReleasePath/releases/download/$LATEST_RELEASE/$BtrfsReleaseFile"
chmod +x "$BtrfsReleaseFile"

echo "Link all btrfs programs to btrfs.box.static. Rename old files as .old.FILENAME"
if ! [ -L ./btrfs ]; then
  for v in $(\ls btrfs*); do
    if [ "$v" != "$BtrfsReleaseFile" ]; then
      mv "$v" ".old.$v"
      ln -s "$BtrfsReleaseFile" "$v"
    fi
  done
fi

echo "--------------------------Current drive and key setup-------------------------"
echo "Mount the current root partition"
cryptsetup luksOpen "/dev/$CurPart" "$CurCryptVol"
vgchange -ay "$CurCryptVol"
mkdir -p "$CurMount"
mount -o "subvol=$CurCryptRootSubVol" "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptRoot" "$CurMount"

echo "If the extra volume has not been created, then resize the swap and create it"
if ! [ -e "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptExtra" ]; then
  lvremove -y "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptSwap"

  lvcreate -n "$CurCryptExtra" -L "$CurCryptExtraSize" "$CurCryptVol"
  mkfs.ext4 "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptExtra"

  lvcreate -n "$CurCryptSwap" -l 100%FREE "$CurCryptVol"
  mkswap "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptSwap"
fi

echo "Make sure the key file exists, if it does not, either copy it (if given in $CurKeyPath) or create it"
mkdir -p "$ExtraMountPath"
mount "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptExtra" "$ExtraMountPath"
if ! [ -e "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName" ]; then
  if [ "$CurKeyPath" != "" ]; then
    if ! [ -e "$CurKeyPath" ]; then
      echo "Not found: $CurKeyPath"
      exit 1
    fi
    cp "$CurKeyPath" "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName"
  else
    openssl rand -out "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName" 512
  fi
  chmod 400 "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName"
  chown root:root "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName"
fi

echo "Make sure the key file works on the current drive"
if cryptsetup --test-passphrase luksOpen --key-file "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName" "/dev/$CurPart" test; then
  echo "Keyfile successfully opened the LUKS partition."
  #cryptsetup luksClose test #This doesn’t seem to be needed
else
  echo "Adding keyfile to the LUKS partition"
  cryptsetup luksAddKey "/dev/$CurPart" "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName"
fi

echo "--------------------------------New drive setup-------------------------------"
echo "Use cfdisk to set the new disk as GPT and add partitions."
echo "Make sure to mark the partition you want to use for the raid disk as type “Linux Filesystem”."
echo "Also make it the same size as /dev/$CurPart to avoid errors"
cfdisk "/dev/$NewDrive"

echo "Encrypt the new partition"
cryptsetup luksFormat "/dev/$NewPart"

echo "Open the encrypted partition"
cryptsetup luksOpen "/dev/$NewPart" "$NewCryptName"

echo "Add the key to the partition"
cryptsetup luksAddKey "/dev/$NewPart" "$ExtraMountPath/$DriveKeyName"

echo "Add the new partition to the root btrfs file system"
btrfs device add "/dev/mapper/$NewCryptName" "$CurMount"

echo "Convert to RAID1"
btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 "$CurMount"

echo "Confirm both disks are in use"
btrfs filesystem usage "$CurMount"

echo "--------------------Booting script to load encrypted drives-------------------"
echo "Get the UUID of the second btrfs volume"
Drive2_UUID=$(lsblk -o UUID -d "/dev/$NewPart" | tail -n1)

echo "Create a script to open your second luks volumes before mounting the partition"
echo "Note: In some scenarios this may need to go into “scripts/local-premount” instead of “scripts/local-bottom”"
cat <<EOF > "$CurMount/etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-bottom/unlock_drive2"
#!/bin/sh
PREREQ=""

prereqs()
{
    echo "\$PREREQ"
}

case "\$1" in
    prereqs)
        prereqs
        exit 0
        ;;
esac

. /scripts/functions
cryptroot-unlock
vgchange -ay "$CurCryptVol"
mkdir -p /mnt/keyfile
mount "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptExtra" /mnt/keyfile
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/disk/by-uuid/$Drive2_UUID "$NewCryptName" "--key-file=/mnt/keyfile/$DriveKeyName"
umount /mnt/keyfile
rmdir /mnt/keyfile

mount -t btrfs -o "subvol=$CurCryptRootSubVol" "/dev/$CurCryptVol/$CurCryptRoot" /root

#If you are weird like me and /usr is stored elsewhere, here is where you would need to mount it.
#It cannot be done through your fstab in this setup.
#mount --bind /root/sub/sys/usr /root/usr

mount --bind /dev /root/dev
mount --bind /proc /root/proc
mount --bind /sys /root/sys
EOF

chmod 755 "$CurMount/etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-bottom/unlock_drive2"

echo "--------------------Setup booting from the root file system-------------------"
echo "Prepare a chroot environment"
for i in dev dev/pts proc sys run tmp; do
  mount -o bind /$i "$CurMount/$i"
done

echo "Run commands in the chroot environment to update initramfs and grub"
chroot "$CurMount" <<EOF
echo "Mount the other partitions (specifically for “boot” and “boot/efi”)"
mount -a

echo "Update initramfs and grub"
update-initramfs -u -k all
update-grub
EOF

echo "-----------------------------------Finish up----------------------------------"
echo "Reboot and pray"
reboot