diff --git a/README b/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..59e791b --- /dev/null +++ b/README @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +LEdoian's debuging Arch live medium +=================================== + +Use at own risk. There is probably nothing clever, I just followed +[ArchWiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archiso)… + +Building notes +-------------- + +I am not too fond of running `mkarchiso` as root on my machine, so I spin up a +VM: + +``` +qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4G -machine q35 -cdrom archlinux-2024.01.01-x86_64.iso -drive if=virtio,format=raw,file=vm.img,cache.no-flush=yes,media=disk +``` + +The `vm.img` is a 20 GB space to clone this repository into, somewhere. + +To build, we need to install archiso (and probably also git) to the VM. + +A pitfall is that `mkarchiso` still downloads packages to +`/var/cache/pacman/pkg`, which means that the VM's rootfs gets full too early. +The solution is either to get enough RAM to fit the whole cache (the current +package set is ~2.5 GB), but symlinking `/var/cache/pacman` to a directory in +the 20 GB space. Pacman does not seem to complain, and if the used parts of the +auxiliary storage fit in RAM, it should be similarly fast (the +`cache.no-flush=yes` option does not flush the host's block cache, or +something, I might not understand this correctly but I think it goes brrrrr). + +After about 1.5 h we get the result: 5.6 GB worth of images – 2.8 GB for the +iso, 2.8 for netboot files (which seem to mainly duplicate the iso contents, +but I understand why they were exported separately). + +In hindsight: I could also tweak the `pacman.conf`, but I came up with the +symlink earlier…) Giving the VM more CPUs would speed up the squashfs creation, +but I didn't. (I wanted the numbers above to have at least some semantics…) The +20 GB space is _not_ enough for non-interactive run, I had to clean pacman's +package cache in order to not run out of space. So 25 GB might be enough (for +anybody)… + +License +------- + +If you (or a lawyer) thinks a random subset of Arch's packages really counts as +copyrightable work, let me put it under CC0-1.0. + +This README is under CC-BY-4.0, but I can negotiate exceptions. + +The rest might be a part of the +[archiso project](https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archiso), `pacman` +tells me that it is licenced under GPL-3.0-or-later. + +Overall, this repository is likewise under GPL-3.0-or-later.