The grub menu displayed as if the system knew which partition contains the bootloader. The root partition mounted by itself. Neither dmesg nor my init/process manager threw any errors. The boot partition was not mounted, neither was swap.
I did manually create an fstab from within the installed system and all is fine, so my question is purely academic. Do modern systems not need an fstab in order to know which devices and partitions to mount where?
The root partition ID is in the grub configuration, it’s mounted when the system boots. Then fstab is read and the other partitions are mounted.
fstab is needed for root mount options and other partitions, but as you saw with your system if the only partitions other than root are not needed to boot your system will boot fine (I don’t know which options grub uses when mounting root though)
I see. Well, normally, when I do make an fstab, I just give it
defaults,noatime, but I wonder what GRUB defaulted to without the fstab. Thanks!