VM Image

The VM image was created using the Arch Linux bootstrap tarball.

• Download and extract arch-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.zst from a mirror (https://archlinux.org/download)

  • Extract with tar xf /path-to-bootstrap-image/archlinux-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.zst --numeric-owner
  • Select a few pacman mirrors in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
  • Mount the root sudo mount --bind ./root.x86_64 ./root.x86_64
  • chroot using arch-chroot (install scripts are provided in this nix shell)

• Install linux (kernel), dracut (for later demonstrations), neovim, sudo-rs (and relevant setup)

• Make user duscc with password duscc

• Set locale, time, hostname

Create an image we can boot from:

• dd if=/dev/zero of=root.img bs=1M count=4096
• cfdisk root.img

Here we create a GPT partition table, with two partitions (1GB EFI, 3GB Linux Root (x86_64) - this is so SystemD can find it for direct boot)

• Mount the image as a loopback device

  • ROOT_LO_DEVICE=$(sudo losetup --find --show --partscan root.img)

• Create filesystems

  • mkfs.fat -F 32 -n BOOT ${ROOT_LO_DEVICE}p1
  • mkfs.ext4 -l ROOT ${ROOT_LO_DEVICE}p2

• Finally, copying our bootstrapped arch root to

  • sudo mount ${ROOT_LO_DEVICE}p1 /mnt
  • sudo cp -rp ./root.x86_64/* /mnt

Resources

• https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/Initialization/
• https://docs.kernel.org/arch/x86/boot.html#pe-coff-entry-point
• https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/efi-stub.html