The existing hook mask only covers pacstrap. pacman.conf(5) HookDir is
absolute, so it never applied to the pacman runs inside arch-chroot, and during
omarchy-setup-system the target's own hooks are live. limine-entry-tool's
90-mkinitcpio-install.hook triggers on usr/lib/firmware/*, usr/src/*/dkms.conf
and usr/lib/modules/*/pkgbase, and collect_pkgbase_files sets rebuild_all for
any trigger outside usr/lib/modules — so it rebuilds the initramfs and UKI for
every installed kernel. The hardware scripts hit that routinely: sof-firmware
on Intel audio, nvidia-open-dkms, linux-ptl on Panther Lake, linux-t2 on Macs.
Every one of those builds is discarded. finalize_limine_boot runs limine-update
immediately after, which pipes "rebuild" into the same script and rebuilds
unconditionally. They are stale as well as redundant: hardware/nvidia.sh writes
its mkinitcpio drop-in after installing the driver.
Mask that one hook inside the target for the duration of the phase. The
kernel-removal hooks stay live — they only prune Limine entries, which is what
ptl-kernel.sh's "pacman -Rdd linux" needs.
A mask that survived would be invisible until a later kernel update shipped a
UKI-less boot, so it is restored in a finally, again in main()'s finally, and
validate_boot repairs and then insists the real hook is back before reboot.
limine-mkinitcpio-hook is a hard dependency of the Omarchy runtime package, so
that file is always on disk before the mask goes up.
Worth several seconds per avoided build on real hardware. It is invisible in
the VM harness, which installs no hardware packages, so measure it on an Intel
laptop rather than in CI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
