* Name the install medium when pacstrap rejects a package off it
A failed install showed "Omarchy installation stopped", the pacstrap error, a log tail, and a link to Discord. Somewhere in that tail was the whole answer -- pacman rejecting a package as corrupt -- and nothing on the screen connected it to the USB stick it came off.
Nothing else can put it there. The offline mirror is bind-mounted onto the target's package cache for the duration of pacstrap, so a package rejected under that path was read straight off the medium; nothing else ever writes there. That is worth saying in the words that name the fix rather than leaving it as a package name nobody recognises.
Which way the medium failed is a separate question, and usually unanswerable after the fact: pacstrap runs with --noconfirm, which answers yes to pacman's "delete it?", so the evidence is unlinked through the bind mount before anything can weigh it. The usual verdict therefore names the medium and gives both remedies in the order worth trying -- verify the download first, because it is cheap and rules out the common case. When the package does survive, the sha256 repo-add recorded at build time separates a bad write from a bad read, and the wording follows.
Co-Authored-By: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
* Keep the media diagnosis whole and print it once
Two things only visible by looking at the rendered screen.
The diagnosis was recorded in the support log before the failure screen was drawn, and the log tail on that screen reads the same file -- so the verdict appeared twice, once as the banner and again eight lines below it. The same finding printed twice reads as two findings. It is recorded after the render now, and the tail carries the installer's own output the way it did before.
The package name shared a line with the sentence explaining it, and the screen is only as wide as the logo. npth's name already pushed the mismatch wording past the edge, and a firmware package would have taken the whole sentence with it. Every verdict puts the name on a line of its own, and the test walks all three with a sixty-three character package name to keep them there.
Co-Authored-By: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
* Break the media diagnosis between what happened and what to do
The package name and the remedy beneath it ran together as one block, so the line telling someone to verify their download read as another clause about the package rather than the first thing to go and do. A blank line separates them in all three verdicts.
The renderer dropped blank lines, on the assumption that any it saw were slack rather than shape, so the break is drawn now instead of skipped.
* Give the log tail back the rows the diagnosis spends
The tail sizes itself from the terminal height less a constant for everything drawn above it, and the diagnosis is seven rows that constant never knew about. On a forty-row console the failure screen came to forty-one and scrolled its own logo off the top. The tail is the part that should give way, so it is told what was spent above it.
The test that came with this first asserted the logo was still on screen, which it cannot: it reads the output stream, and the stream keeps every row ever emitted whether or not it stayed visible. It passed with the fix reverted. It checks the mechanism instead -- a tail that reaches fewer lines of the log when a diagnosis is present -- against two logs identical line for line but for the one path that decides whether there is a diagnosis at all.
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Co-authored-by: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
The loader now settles udev before probing, so a fast boot cannot miss
the drive and silently drop a headless install into the wizard. All the
files come over in a single cp, and a failed copy removes anything it
already copied and falls back to the wizard: the wizard cleans up only
what it writes itself, so a half-copied ssh.json would otherwise leak
into the interactive install that follows. The command takes an optional
path prefix so tests can run it against a sandbox instead of the live
system.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Squashfs decompresses on the page-fault path through a single stream
(CONFIG_SQUASHFS_DECOMP_SINGLE), where xz manages roughly a tenth of zstd's
throughput, and the live root is read cold on every boot: kernel, plymouth,
systemd, python, archinstall, gum. The offline mirror is already stored
uncompressed, so this only covers the part that still gets decompressed.
Costs well under a percent of ISO size. Dropping the x86 BCJ filter also
removes one of the blockers listed in plans/aarch64-support.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
