Archinstall 2.7 Brings Unified Kernel Image Support To The Arch Linux Installer

[skeevy420]

skeevy420 --ultra is only needed if you go beyond -19 in zstd

I know, but I leave it there since it doesn't hurt anything and I occasionally like to see the difference in compression level and time to compress.

To add to my earlier post:

Zstd 3 374MB
mkinitcpio -P 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 13.715 total

Zstd 10 342MB
mkinitcpio -P 0.01s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 17.080 total

Zstd 22 308MB
mkinitcpio -P 0.00s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 3:50.52 total

Going ultra in and of itself nearly doubles the time from 19 to 20, 48 secs to 1:57, for the minuscule compression gains of 4MB. Using 22, the extra 3 minutes in compression time for 8MB saved over Zstd 19 isn't worth it for personal-use kernel images. It's not like I'm distributing Zstd compressed files to massive amounts of people.

Zstd 19 316MB
mkinitcpio -P 0.01s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 48.115 total

Zstd 20 312MB
mkinitcpio -P 0.00s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 1:57.11 total

Those results are why I go with 10. Good enough compression without being noticeably slower than the default level. 19 isn't a bad level to use, either.

That's on a 7800X3D with schedutil running Linux 6.6.2-3 with Zstd 1.5.5. I ran Zstd 19 with both performance and schedutil and this was the performance results:

Zstd 19 w/ Performance
mkinitcpio -P 0.00s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 48.276 total

[muncrief]

I run Manjaro on my media server, and Arch on my desktop, and I love both of them.

But while it's nice that Arch finally decided to attempt to make their OS installable by non-technical users, I've found Archinstall to be completely useless for anything other than "wipe everything out and install Arch in limited configurations."

On top of that, I believe it to be a complete waste of developer resources as fantastically customizable, and well tested, options like Calamares are freely available.

Really, I can't think of one good reason why Arch is developing their own installer from scratch. And like I said, it's just terrible, and given the current pace of development will take years to approach the competence of already existing solutions.

[mb_q]

Really, I can't think of one good reason why Arch is developing their own installer from scratch. And like I said, it's just terrible, and given the current pace of development will take years to approach the competence of already existing solutions.

They are not, this is a community effort, yet, IMHO, totally against the distro's philosophy of being explicit and not wrapping things into some shiny magical GUIs that disable most functionality. In fact Arch Wiki is rather discouraging about Archinstall: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...l&oldid=793041
For those who want their packages but not to touch command line, there is Manjaro and friends.

[fallingcats]

I have been using Arch Linux with Secure Boot + UKI + systemd-boot (dualbooting with Windows 11) in both of my machines for a few weeks and it has been a hassle-free experience so far, though I really need to resize the EFI partition I share with Windows as I don't even have space for a fallback image, lol. I know I could create an XBOOTLDR partition but I couldn't make systemd-boot read UKIs there, which kind of makes sense given that you should put just kernels and initramfs there, not UKIs.

I might try different compression algorithms.

If you are using a UKI, you don;t need anything else on your efi partition. you can move everything except for the uki onto /boot on your root partition, and mount efi under /boot/efi, even with systemd-boot.

[murlakatamenka]

I know, but I leave it there since it doesn't hurt anything and I occasionally like to see the difference in compression level and time to compress.

ah, that's what I had in mynd. Smart guy skeevy420