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?
Grub typically stores the uuid of the root filesystem in the kernel command line arguments (I can’t quite remember if that’s the right name it not).
Have a look at the grub configuration when in the grub menu and you should see it there.
Thanks! That seems to be the case exactly!