repo-add takes one package at a time: it hashes the archive and lists its
files, which means decompressing all of it, for about a thousand
packages one after another.
A database is a tar of one directory per package. The packages are dealt
out to one repo-add per CPU, each writing its own database, and the
pieces are joined. On 160 packages on a 16-core machine the result is
identical to one repo-add's, db and files, in 1.0 s against 6.3 s. Two
versions of one package name are an error: one repo-add would keep the
last, the pieces apart would keep both.
GitHub's hosted runner has 4 cores. The build job moves to
namespace-profile-linux-amd64-16x32; the publish job, which only copies
files and holds the bucket's key, stays where it is.
Those runners' kernel has no Landlock, so pacman 7 fails its first sync
in a container there. The ISO build already steps around that; the
install test's container does the same now. The job also prints what it
is running on: CPU, memory, LSMs and /dev/kvm.
pacman 7 sandboxes its downloads with Landlock and fails every database
sync on a kernel without it, which Namespace's AmpereOne arm64 machines
run: "restricting filesystem access failed because Landlock is not
supported by the kernel!". An ISO build there stops at its first
pacman -Sy.
Where /sys/kernel/security/lsm lists no landlock, or cannot be read, a
wrapper in /usr/local/bin runs every pacman in the build container,
pacstrap's included, with --disable-sandbox, the flag pacman provides for
such kernels. Not DisableSandbox in a config: pacman-offline.conf ships
on the ISO.
The nightly built the stable ISO and kept it as an artifact for a day.
It now builds the edge ISO, runs the install test on it, seals the
installed disk that test leaves behind into a VM image, checks the
image, and publishes ISO and image under a version that is never reused:
nightly.omarchy.org/edge/latest.json
nightly.omarchy.org/edge/<version>/omarchy-edge-<version>.iso
nightly.omarchy.org/edge/<version>/vm/
latest.json gives the version, the ISO's URL and checksum, the
omarchy-iso commit, the Omarchy version and commit inside, and where the
image is. It is written last, after every file has been fetched back
through the CDN and compared.
Publishing is a second job, the only one with the bucket's key, and only
on quattro. There is no pull_request trigger. A manual run on a branch
builds and checks everything and publishes nothing.
test/integration already installs the ISO unattended and saves the
installed disk as test-runs/<iso>-integration/base.qcow2, with its
firmware variables and the key that logs in to it. That folder is what
vm-seal takes, so the separate install script goes.
The sealed image now also carries the firmware variables, which hold the
boot entry the installer registered: a consumer that boots the disk
through UEFI needs them, a direct kernel boot does not.
builder/build-iso.sh puts omarchy-dev and omarchy-settings-dev on an edge
ISO, as it does on a dev or local one. The harness picked its package
names from the ISO's file name and knew dev, local and pr, so for an edge
ISO it asked the installer for the release packages.
As they were tested by hand on the 4.0.4 ISO, before any of it is wired
into a workflow:
vm-install unattended install of an ISO into a qcow2, through cidata
vm-seal makes the disk publishable: SSH takes keys only, no machine
ID, host keys, build key or build logs left, compressed
with zstd, with checksums and the kernel pulled out for
direct boot
vm-verify boots the sealed image once and checks all of that
vm-boot boots a throwaway copy with a key made for that boot and
runs a command in it
On this machine: install 114 s, seal 27 s, a 4.2 GB image, SSH about 5 s
after power-on, 17 of 17 verify checks, and 7 of them failing on an
image sealed without these fixes.
* Carry the installer input-method choice into the target
* Support Archinstall 4.5 sanity checks
* Constrain VM keyboard choices to supported credential layouts
* Cover VM keyboard offsets and reject absent choices
./test/all runs the cidata and orchestrator tests under test/unit/ in a couple of seconds, with no ISO. It runs in an Arch container, where the code it covers runs: the container boots systemd for the tests that ask localectl for its keymaps, and the tests run as an ordinary user. The install test keeps covering everything that needs a VM.
The harness runs as root in its container, so test-runs and the serial
logs QEMU writes there belong to root. The runner's user could then
neither record the pull request number beside them nor read
install-serial.log into the artifact (EACCES at zip time), which failed
the job after a passing install and boot. A chown -R step after the
container step, run even on failure, fixes both. The install loop now
prints a line every 30 s and still screenshots every 2 min.
Review fixes for the comment workflow. Artifacts are downloaded by name
for the exact attempt that finished, and for the baseline run's latest
attempt, since a rerun keeps earlier attempts' artifacts under the same
run. Every lookup prints nothing instead of failing, so no quattro
baseline yet, an expired one, or a missing boot file shows as "–"
rather than ending the script under set -e before any comment. The
install test's own marker step takes ownership of test-runs first,
which the harness created as root inside its container.
The harness now runs in archlinux:latest with /dev/kvm passed through,
so CI uses Arch's current QEMU and OVMF (QEMU 11.1, edk2 202608) at the
paths the harness expects, the same as an Omarchy workstation, instead
of Ubuntu 24.04's QEMU 8.2 with symlinks and shims. Arch splits QEMU's
devices into modules: virtio-vga needs both qemu-hw-display-virtio-gpu
and qemu-hw-display-virtio-vga, and QEMU 11.1 segfaults on
-device virtio-vga when only the latter is installed.
wait_for_ssh counted only its sleeps toward the timeout. Under QEMU user
networking each attempt can also spend its whole ConnectTimeout waiting
for a banner, so a "300 s" wait ran for ten minutes or more without a
line of output. It now uses a wall-clock deadline, polls every 2 s, and
prints a progress line with a console screenshot every 30 s. When the
boot scenario times out it prints the serial console's last lines too.
Review fixes. The first-boot systemd-analyze now waits (bounded) for
startup to finish, since SSH can answer first and systemd-analyze
refuses until it has. In the boot scenario, a non-zero exit from
is-system-running (as for "degraded") no longer ends the script under
set -e before the diagnostics are saved, and a failed query for failed
units writes a marker instead of an empty file that read as "none".
A second workflow, triggered when the install test completes, posts one
comment on the pull request and updates it on every run: install, first
boot and everyday boot next to quattro's latest numbers, with the change,
and the install phases in a collapsed table. Pushes to quattro now run
the install test too, so there is always a baseline.
It runs from quattro's copy with write access, which works for pull
requests from forks, so it never checks out or runs pull request code.
It reads only the finished run's artifact, trusts the pull request
number in it only when that pull request's head is the commit the run
tested, and keeps phase names to plain text.
Builds the ISO a pull request produces, installs it unattended in a KVM
guest on a GitHub-hosted runner, boots the installed system again, and
writes the install time per phase plus first-boot and everyday-boot
systemd-analyze to the job summary. Every later installer change is
measured against these numbers in its own PR.
Locally against the 2026-10-04 quattro ISO: install 51.3 s (42.9 s of
it pacstrap), first boot 12.1 s, everyday boot 11.7 s with ~6 s in the
loader, systemd running, no failed units.
A disk check replaces a cleanup step: the runner has ~86 GB free, so
the 2-minute "Free Disk Space" action the nightly uses is not needed.
Boots the installed system a second time, records the time to SSH and
systemd-analyze, and asserts systemd reaches running with no failed
units. It gives CI a scenario that passes on today's installer and a
number for every change that touches boot.
After an unattended install the harness now copies the installer's
timing file and log off the installed system, with systemd-analyze from
its first boot, next to the base image, so CI can report them without
attaching the disk. OMARCHY_INTEGRATION_DISK_CACHE sets the target
disk's QEMU cache mode; cache=none keeps the host page cache out of the
guest's writes, so install times measure the installer rather than the
host.
arch-mact2 dropped apple-bcm-firmware on 2026-09-16 and published
apple-bcm-firmware-fetcher in its place. The new package only conflicts
with the old name instead of replacing it, so pacman cannot follow the
rename and every nightly build has aborted with "target not found"
since 2026-09-17.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CRnZrQDE6jowz4KxmzusL8
Arch dropped the prebuilt broadcom-wl on 2026-09-02 and rebuilt broadcom-wl-dkms with replaces=(broadcom-wl). That only helps upgrades of an installed package; as an explicit pacman -Syw target the old name fails with "target not found", which broke the offline mirror download. Published runtime packages that predate the rename still list it in omarchy-other.packages, so rewrite it at build time until every channel ships a runtime naming broadcom-wl-dkms itself.
The acceptance harness waits for the installer greeter by looking for
"Opinionated", which the tagline no longer contains: it now reads "Beautiful,
Fun & Agentic Linux by DHH". Every scenario the harness drives fails at the
first screen with
Timed out after 300s waiting for screen: Opinionated
five minutes into a run that never gets further.
Matching "Linux by DHH" instead. That is the half of the tagline naming the
product rather than describing it, it is common to the old wording and the new,
and OCR reads it cleanly off the greeter. A tagline is marketing copy and will
be rewritten again; the product name is what the test actually means.
Graceful guest poweroff over SSH first, escalating to TERM then KILL;
--kill skips straight to force. Finds the newest live run by its pidfile
and confirms before acting when run from a terminal, since a harness
still driving the VM dies with it.
A VNC viewer that resizes the guest framebuffer makes the console font
unreadable to OCR, which stranded the bootstrap at its login-prompt gate.
Getty is reliably on the spare TTY and SSH coming up is the real success
signal, so type the login blind and retry the whole sequence up to three
times; a failed pass just leaves getty re-prompting.
Also print the resize-safe viewer invocation whenever a VM starts: a
resize during early boot can wedge virtio-gpu before the system is up.
--rc appended a bare -rc suffix regardless of the version passed, so
every candidate of a train uploaded over the same omarchy-X.Y.Z-rc.iso
and nobody could tell rc1 from rc2 by name or URL. A version that
already numbers its candidate (4.0.2rc2) is the complete artifact name;
the suffix remains for unnumbered candidate builds.
--sync-omarchy now pushes all of test/ (the security coverage lives in
shell.d as well as acceptance.d), and the acceptance run gets
OMARCHY_ACCEPTANCE_SUDO_PASSWORD so the suite's opt-in sshd hardening
exercise can run against the throwaway VM.
--sync-all additionally runs the CLI and shell suites inside the guest
from the synced tree. The acceptance suite always runs against
/usr/share/omarchy either way: VM runs verify the finished product, and
qs matches shell instances by config path, so pointing the suite at the
synced tree just reads the session shell as "not running".
Omarchy now binds Super+Space to the Omarchy menu and Super+Alt+Space to
the apps menu, and the omarchy.launcher plugin is gone (the apps menu
replaced it). The smoke table still expected the old launcher binding, so
both chords failed against current builds. Both surfaces open under the
omarchy-menu layer namespace.
Tesseract cannot read the highlighted "Yes, install without encryption"
button under any preprocessing, so waiting for that text always timed out
and killed unencrypted installs at the disk warning. Capture the screen and
continue instead; a Ctrl+C toggle that failed to apply still surfaces when
the unexpectedly encrypted install stalls at the LUKS prompt on first boot.
The artifacts a release exists to hand out — the download URL and the
checksum to verify it with — were buried in rclone transfer noise or
absent entirely. Print them together as the final output, after the
upload has actually succeeded (set -e means reaching this line is the
success path).
The docker group is root-equivalent, so Omarchy operators stay out of
it on purpose — which left omarchy-iso-make unable to reach the daemon
at all. Fall back to sudo docker when a plain client call cannot reach
the socket; the script already prompts for interactive sudo elsewhere.
DOCKER_ARGS (including HOST_UID/HOST_GID) are assembled before the
escalation, so output ownership is unchanged.
omarchy-iso-release ran every step unconditionally: when docker denied
the build, it fell through to signing and uploading the newest stale
*-rc.iso from release/ under the new release's name — a six-month-old
ISO shipped as omarchy-4.0.2-rc.iso. set -e ends the release at the
first failed step, and also aborts when release/ holds no ISO for the
ref at all.
The same frame opens omarchy's first boot from its own copy of the string, so both repositories change together or an install and the deferred first boot after it bookend the setup with different words. Nothing generates one copy from the other: the vendoring between the repositories covers the setup form, not the greeter.
The line is centred from its own length, so the three characters it loses move it one column and nothing else.
pacman-online-rc.conf's [omarchy] repo moves from pkgs.omarchy.org/edge to
pkgs.omarchy.org/rc: an RC ISO now bundles and installs the release-candidate
packages against the package set stable users will get, instead of edge
churn.
* 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.
---------
Co-authored-by: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
The release script computed the ISO's sha256 and echoed it to the releaser's terminal, where nobody downloading the ISO could ever see it, and the uploader shipped the ISO and its signature but nothing to check the download against. So "verify your download" was not advice anyone could act on.
That matters more for this ISO than for most. The offline pacman mirror lives inside the airootfs and is stored uncompressed, and the installer bind-mounts it onto the target's package cache, so pacstrap reads packages straight off the medium. A flipped block there meets no decompressor and no squashfs block checksum on the way; pacman's integrity check is the first thing in the chain to notice, minutes into the install, as "invalid or corrupted package" against a package name that says nothing about the download.
The sidecar names the ISO alone rather than the build path, so it verifies from whatever directory it was downloaded into. A release that cannot write it stops, because the sidecar left over from the previous release reads as a checksum for this one. The uploader now tallies every copy instead of letting the last one decide the exit status, and warns when there is no checksum to publish.
Co-authored-by: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
Emir Beganovic