2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

fredbezies · 2015-05-20 09:20:03

Looks like I tried to install on "a bad day"

Try again a network install, and all is ok. Weird !

I tried to boot in UEFI mode network iso in VirtualBox, nothing happens. The same in Qemu. I will try with full ISO.

Last edited by fredbezies (2015-05-20 09:35:36)

tpowa · 2015-05-22 14:29:54

2015.05-1 images removed from servers due to weird ext4 data loss bug introduced in 4.0.2 kernel.
New images with fixed kernel will appear soon.

tpowa · 2015-05-26 09:59:00

New ISO with fixed kernels online.

banana_pancakes · 2015-06-06 18:43:19

The LUKS encryption options in archboot 2015.05-2 are not great: they are forced to take outdated non-default values for cryptsetup which are known to be vulnerable according to the arch wiki (end of this section), which links to this practical attack.
It should probably just simply take whichever defaults cryptsetup currently has.

p.s.: Is this the right place to post this kind of thing?

tpowa · 2015-06-06 19:38:53

Yes this is the right place. The defaults haven't changed in setup script for long time so probably a good idea to revisit those.

banana_pancakes · 2015-06-06 19:43:03

Cool, thanks.

On an unrelated note, is it possible to add the diff binary? It can be useful for comparing conf files.

tpowa · 2015-06-06 19:45:00

Shouldn't be a big issue to add diff binary.

banana_pancakes · 2015-06-06 20:26:23

Ok, and last issue I had -- I was unfamiliar with UEFI before starting this installation, and the wiki recommends in several places to mount /boot on the ESP partition - this is fine.

However, there is some related non-obvious behavior in the archboot installation media's setup procedure, specifically in the "Set Filesystem Mountpoints" step. For reference, I was, at the time, using:

For '/': a btrfs partition inside a LUKS/dm-crypt partition (which were setup during the installation procedure)
For '/boot': a 512mb fat32 partition (formatted before launching the archboot installation media)
no swap
No other partitions

After mounting '/', it asks for mounting additional partitions. In my case, I also wanted to mount '/boot' to the ESP. The documentation states:

Every time you specify a partition to mount, you will be asked if you
want to create a filesystem on the respective partition. If you select
YES, you will be asked what filesystem to create (a matter of taste,
really. Choose ext4 if you have no clue), and the partition will be
formatted with the chosen filesystem, destroying all data in the
process. It should be no problem, however, to say NO at this point to
preserve any existing files on the partition.

However, I found this to be incorrect. Specifically, I was unable to say "no" at that point to preserve the files on the partition while still mounting said partition. In other words, I could not mount '/boot' without reformatting it, and I was unable to format it because the formatting options at this stage do not include fat32 which is required for an ESP partition.
So the only option was to switch to a different console at that stage and mount manually:

mount /dev/<partition> /install/boot

where "/dev/<partition>" is a pre-formatted fat32 partition.

The problem is that the user should be able to:

Say "no" and still mount /boot to ESP without formatting as the documentation suggests
Format with fat32 in case we want the partition to be the ESP as the wiki suggests in several different articles
Documentation should clarify that it's OK to mount /boot here to a partition (ESP) where we intend to install the bootloader (which can/will be done at a later stage of the install process), and that said partition needs to be fat32 in this case.

In retrospect, it's not so confusing when we know what we should do, but at the time, it was incredibly confusing, and I needed several tries to figure out the behavior.

Thanks for your work on arch!

p.s.: another minor issue is lines 1767 and 1815 state that the ESP needs to be 1gb which is not correct, it needs to be at least 500MiB (or 512MiB?) (smallest fat32 partition iirc). (This is only a typo in the text, it accepts smaller partitions if they exist)

tpowa · 2015-09-04 18:27:24

Hey there, preparing new release soon.
Added diff binary, changed cryptsetup to use the defaults, changed to systemd-boot from gummiboot etc.

The 1GB EFI is my personal default, it's also recommended for Windows installations that's the reason for this text.

tpowa · 2015-09-11 09:32:57

New images sync to the servers now.
2015.09-1
Have fun.

ishitatsuyuki · 2016-04-14 14:38:33

Any release plan? Love archboot but doesn't work on skylake

tpowa · 2016-05-15 16:17:39

New images 2016.05-1 2k16-R1 syncing to the servers.
Have fun

Last edited by tpowa (2016-05-15 16:17:58)

regid · 2016-06-06 01:36:20

tpowa wrote:

Arch Linux (archboot creation tool) 2016.05-1 "2k16-R1" has been released.

I tried it.
Forgot to mention before it was archlinux-2016.05-1-archboot-network.iso.
There is non deleted text below the deleted lines:
At some point during boot it failed. The following information might not be accurate as the messages were running too fast. I think the failure was after trying something related to ssh. I am quite sure there was a message about

[del]Failed to start generate shutdown-ramfs[/del]

~~it can very well be that after the failure message there was a message related to mkcpio, or something like that. At the end the power was turned off.~~

Was I expected to open a bug rather then reporting here?

It turned out that the failure is more complex. After disconnecting the usb keyboard, a usb mice and the Ethernet cable from the machine, it manged to boot. One should not rule out the possibility that some internal hardware component is dying.

I think there should be a way to single step the boot, and shutdown, processes. Otherwise, messages on the screen are not readable, due to the pace of events.

As an aside, I think it takes a long time between the message about edd, and its predecessor message. And also after the edd message.

Last edited by regid (2016-06-07 11:50:45)

tpowa · 2016-08-27 05:40:04

New version is uploading to servers.
Have fun.

tpowa · 2016-12-10 06:02:36

New version is uploading to servers.
Have fun.

cybe-arch · 2016-12-15 11:29:37

Tried to install it on a disk attached through NVMe.

Disk is found as:
/dev/nvm0n1

And partitions are:
/dev/nvm0n1p1
(and so on)

But the step 8) Install bootloader seems to think the disk is located at /dev/nvm (which doesn't exist)

Seems to be here

sed 's/\(.\{8\}\).*/\1/'

Only get's 8 characters, my disk has 12

Also this needs to be changed since my disk has the letter "p" in front of the partition number.

UEFISYS_PART="${DISC}${UEFISYS_PART_NUM}"

Could we do something like this rusty bash-foo (?)

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Finds disk and partition where boot is mounted
# lsblk lists the disk first and containing partitions below
lsblk -i --output KNAME,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT | while read KNAME TYPE MOUNTPOINT
do
 if [ "$TYPE" = "disk" ]; then
   SELECTED_DISK="$KNAME"
 elif [ "$MOUNTPOINT" = "/boot" ]; then
   printf "Boot-disk: $SELECTED_DISK\nBoot-partition: $KNAME\n"
 fi
done

Oh, and it seems to be the same issue with auto prepare disks, btw.

Last edited by cybe-arch (2016-12-16 19:32:45)

Jristz · 2017-01-31 08:06:36

Question: the next version will still ship i686 and x86_64 or will just be 100% x86_64 now?

simeon · 2017-02-12 00:04:26

I have problems booting the archboot medium. I have a trekstor surftab with a 32bit UEFI. Contrary to the archlinux install medium, archboot gets booted from my flash drive and the grub menu is shown. However I cannot get passed the grub menu: After trying to start any menu entry I'm left with a blank screen. I already tried i915.modeset=0 with no success.

I simply flashed with dd the archlinux-2016.12-1-archboot.iso to the flash drive. As suggested by #archlinux !uefi32, I checked https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm … efi_64bit/ but I cannot see any changes required in the current bootia32.cfg. However I added some entries. It looks currently like this:

insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
insmod fat

insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod video_bochs
insmod video_cirrus
insmod all_video
insmod part_gpt
insmod ext2

insmod font

if loadfont "/fonts/unicode.pf2" ; then
    #loadfont "/fonts/unicode.pf2"
    insmod gfxterm
    set gfxmode="1366x768x32;1280x800x32;1024x768x32;auto"
    #set gfxmode="auto"
    terminal_input console
    terminal_output gfxterm
fi

set default="Arch Linux x86_64 Archboot - EFI MIXED MODE SIMEON"
set timeout="5"

menuentry "Arch Linux x86_64 Archboot - EFI MIXED MODE SIMEON" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /boot/vmlinuz_x86_64
    echo 'start loading'
    linux /boot/vmlinuz_x86_64 cgroup_disable=memory add_efi_memmap _IA32_UEFI=1 rootfstype=ramfs archisobasedir=arch archisolabel=ARCHBOOT i915.modeset=0
    echo	'Initiale Ramdisk will be loaded'
    initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs_x86_64.img
    echo 'loading ramdisk done'
}

menuentry "Arch Linux i686 Archboot - EFI MIXED MODE SIMEON" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /boot/vmlinuz_i686
    linux /boot/vmlinuz_i686 cgroup_disable=memory add_efi_memmap _IA32_UEFI=1 rootfstype=ramfs archisobasedir=arch archisolabel=ARCHBOOT
    initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs_i686.img
}

menuentry "Arch Linux x86_64 Archboot - EFI MIXED MODE" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /boot/vmlinuz_x86_64
    linux /boot/vmlinuz_x86_64 cgroup_disable=memory add_efi_memmap _IA32_UEFI=1 rootfstype=ramfs
    initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs_x86_64.img
}

menuentry "Arch Linux i686 Archboot Non-EFISTUB" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /boot/vmlinuz_i686
    linux /boot/vmlinuz_i686 cgroup_disable=memory add_efi_memmap _IA32_UEFI=1 rootfstype=ramfs
    initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs_i686.img
}

# menuentry "Syslinux for x86_64 Kernel in IA32 UEFI" {
    # search --no-floppy --set=root --file /EFI/syslinux/efi32/syslinux.efi
    # chainloader /EFI/syslinux/efi32/syslinux.efi
# }

menuentry "UEFI Shell IA32 v2" {
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /EFI/tools/shellia32_v2.efi
    chainloader /EFI/tools/shellia32_v2.efi
}

menuentry "UEFI Shell IA32 v1" {
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /EFI/tools/shellia32_v1.efi
    chainloader /EFI/tools/shellia32_v1.efi
}

menuentry "Exit GRUB" {
    exit
}

Besides the UEFI shells, I cannot start anything from there.

The flash drive has labels/IDs like this:

ls -l /dev/disk/* | grep 'disk\|sdb'                                                                                                   :(
/dev/disk/by-id:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 12. Feb 00:46 usb-Kingston_DataTraveler_2.0_6CF049E31FC2BFA03933877B-0:0 -> ../../sdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 usb-Kingston_DataTraveler_2.0_6CF049E31FC2BFA03933877B-0:0-part1 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 usb-Kingston_DataTraveler_2.0_6CF049E31FC2BFA03933877B-0:0-part2 -> ../../sdb2
/dev/disk/by-label:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 ARCHBOOT -> ../../sdb1
/dev/disk/by-partuuid:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 61a8d74c-01 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 61a8d74c-02 -> ../../sdb2
/dev/disk/by-path:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 12. Feb 00:46 pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 -> ../../sdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part2 -> ../../sdb2
/dev/disk/by-uuid:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 2016-12-09-21-05-00-00 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 12. Feb 00:46 C7BE-D516 -> ../../sdb2

I can see the echo output ('loading ramdisk done'), but then it looks like the system halts. ctrl-alt-del does not work after the last echo output. Any ideas what goes wrong? Did I hit a bug?

mianka · 2018-02-16 01:41:07

Is there still life in this archboot animal?Last post dates back 1 year.
Are we going to see a new archboot disk?

tpowa · 2018-06-24 19:28:27

Here is the resurrection of archboot.
New version is up on the mirrors.

Have fun.
greetings
tpowa

mianka · 2018-06-26 14:03:34

Big hug!
Mianka

P.S. / Did you see this? : https://github.com/grm34/archboot

Last edited by mianka (2018-06-26 14:06:00)

tpowa · 2018-06-26 14:25:54

Not seen yet, but not really related to my project.
As you can see on git, next release will contain a lot of setup fixes, like nvme device support and such things.

Keep on reporting issues.
Thanks.
greetings
tpowa

mianka · 2018-11-12 15:00:56

One little question:Is archboot still capable of installing i686 (32bit) version or not? When I start the installation I get into the graphical selection screen where there is an item for i686, but when you select it, it does nothing.
It's a dell latitude 2100 (i686,1gig ram,ssd)

Last edited by mianka (2018-11-12 15:02:44)

tpowa · 2018-11-14 06:55:50

Hi sorry i686 support was removed from setup this year.

mianka · 2018-11-14 17:32:19

Thank you,T.

By the way, there is someone doing a "normal" arch 32 installation: https://archlinux32.org/

Last edited by mianka (2018-11-14 17:34:58)

Arch Linux

#26 2015-05-20 09:20:03

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#27 2015-05-22 14:29:54

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#28 2015-05-26 09:59:00

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#29 2015-06-06 18:43:19

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#30 2015-06-06 19:38:53

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#31 2015-06-06 19:43:03

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#32 2015-06-06 19:45:00

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#33 2015-06-06 20:26:23

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#34 2015-09-04 18:27:24

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#35 2015-09-11 09:32:57

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#36 2016-04-14 14:38:33

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#37 2016-05-15 16:17:39

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#38 2016-06-06 01:36:20

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#39 2016-08-27 05:40:04

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#40 2016-12-10 06:02:36

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#41 2016-12-15 11:29:37

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#42 2017-01-31 08:06:36

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#43 2017-02-12 00:04:26

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#44 2018-02-16 01:41:07

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#45 2018-06-24 19:28:27

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#46 2018-06-26 14:03:34

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#47 2018-06-26 14:25:54

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#48 2018-11-12 15:00:56

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#49 2018-11-14 06:55:50

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

#50 2018-11-14 17:32:19

Re: 2024.09 Archboot - Arch Linux ISO hybrid image and UKIs released

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