Suggestion fron encrypted setup on a laptop with two SSDs

Hi everyone, I purchased a Dell XPS 17 laptop that has two slots for SSDs, so naturally I want to take advantage of them, by combining two disk into a single LVM volume.

So I installed Leap 15.2 with LVM and XFS as the file system using the two disks (1TB from the factory plus and additional 512GB), however now I get asked for the encryption key twice, before getting to the GRUB menu.

So questions:

  1. Why do I have to enter it twice before the GRUB menu? I also get asked for the key after GRUB, but that can be solved with the initrd method. When using a single SSD, I only get asked a single time.
  2. Is there ANY way to get the fingerprint reader to work as an auth method for this? So when I get asked for the key before GRUB, authenticate with a fingerprint instead of typing in the key. That would be extremely helpful.
  3. To rub salt on the wound so to say, after typing in the password I have to wait quite a bit of time for the prompt of the second password, maybe 10 seconds or more. And after typing the password a second time, I have to wait the same amount of time again for the GRUB menu to appear.

Maybe a full LVM encryption is not mandatory and I could do with just an encrypted /home setup? However I don’t want to type in the key for the encryption and then the key for the user (I use autologin now since the machine can’t boot without the key anyway). Is there a way to decrypt the /home directory with the user’s password, which can be the same password?

Encryption is mandatory on my laptop due to the nature of my work.

Thank you!

That’s due to the limitations of grub. Since you have two encrypted disks in the LVM, it needs both keys to read the LVM and get to the menu.

Maybe you could rethink your use of disk space, so that all of “/boot” depends on only one encrypted disk.