This new release of archinstall addresses the many issues raised by the community. We would like to thank every single one who submitted issues, gave feedback and most importantly suggested or contributed to solutions to all these issues.

This is by no means a perfect release, a lot of work remains ahead. But we believe this is a step in the right direction with both accessibility improvements as well as stability and some security enhancements for the guided template that we ship. Below is a list of all the changes since the previous version, and we will begin with the breaking changes to highlight those.

Breaking changes

• Filesystem()'s context manager (using with Filesystem()) no longer wipes the disk on entry, it no longer detects or handles differences in partition table vs expected partition table format (gpt vs mbr), instead those operations have moved to individual functions, see below in the Filesystem header as well as the Installer header, where mount logic has moved to.
• Going from * imports to targeted imports. This should not cause issues, but if there's any API call not available do let us know.
• BlockDevice().json() now only returns the string representation of path to the blockdevice ("/dev/sda" for instance)
• BlockDevice().__dump__() has one additional dimension to the JSON dictionary, where it represent itself as "/dev/sda" : {"info": "value"} rather than a flat structure.
• BlockDevice().device_or_backfile now return the backfile when the device is a loopdevice, BlockDevice().device still returns limited information of the type (raid, crypt and others).
• Partition().size is now a read-only value and the parameter Partition(size=X) has hence been removed
• Partition().allow_formatting has been removed/deprecated, this is handled via direct function calls instead of automatically wiping a partition.
• Partition().safe_to_format() has been deprecated and removed since no automatic formatting or changes are done. Any destructive changes has to be explicitly called, and there for that is the safeguard instead.
• Partition().format() no longer has the argument allow_formatting as it's implicitly set whenever the function is called. This means that "testing" which file systems are supported is no longer supported, but instead we have a curated list of supported file systems that can be used.
• Partition().format() no longer uses the nomenclature vfat for the filesystem argument, instead fat32 is used. This to better reflect the mount call later where fat32 is specified and better reflects man parted's expectations.
• archinstall.JSON serializer now correctly removes any key in a dictionary that starts with !, for instance "!password" : "moo" will get filtered out. To serialize a structure without loosing values, use archinstall.UNSAFE_JSON which is unsafe to use unless you know what you're doing.
• The gfx_driver argument in profiles etc no longer has supported for Nvidia, and instead of using sub-menu's under the Nvidia category there is now two top level choices of either Nvidia (open-source) and Nvidia (proprietary). They both do the same as before, just on a top level of choices and as a single argument in JSON configurations/profiles.
• The default installation mountpoint is no longer /mnt but instead /mnt/archinstall
• Disk layout and configuration has moved from user_configuration.json into user_disk_layouts.json (It's still supported for as long as possible to define these in user_configuration.json for backwards compatibility reasons)
• User credentials have moved from user_configuration.json into user_credentials.json (It's still supported for as long as possible to define these in user_configuration.json for backwards compatibility reasons)
• Keywords in the JSON configuration has changed in the guided installer:
  • keyboard-language has been re-named to keyboard-layout
  • harddrive has been re-named to harddrives (and changed structure)
  • disk_layouts have been added and replaces harddrives partially
  • users have changed to !users
  • superusers have changed to !superusers

Highlighted new features

• GRUB and Disk Encryption now properly works.
• BTRFS subvolumes (very early beta feature, hence some limitations for initial tests. Supports only a nested structure and some issues are known with this approach)
• Archinstall now detects if espeakup.service is active on the installation ISO and copies the setup over to the installed medium automatically.
• Now supports multiple encrypted volumes (slightly limited, it's either on or off, but multiple partitions will be encrypted). All encrypted partitions are protected by the passphrase as usual and stored in key-slot 0, bu every partition that is not the root partition will also have a computer generated passphrase stored on the root device under /dev/cryptsetup-keys.d/ and that passphrase is stored in key-slot 1 on the partition. It's a unique passphrase per volume.
• More reliable disk operations (partitioning, encryption and mounting)
• A rudimentary plugin-support, allowing users to create their own plugins. There are four ways of activating the plugin support, either via --plugin=url|location, via en entry in --config as {"plugin": "url|location"} or via the API call archinstall.load_plugin() or finally via pip install yourplugin assuming that the plugin registers itself via Pythons builtin entry-point system as archinstall.plugin. These plugins are triggered/called at various points in the installation and more documentation on this specific will come and be continuously updated. One such step is archinstall.pacstrap() which calls on_pacstrap(package_list) in the plugin and the return value should be a curated list of packages, this enables for instance custom plugins to be written and deal with for instance AUR packages and deal with the custom operations needed and filter out those packages from the rest of the install process, leaving only official packages to be dealt with by the official installation process. (again, just an example).
• swap has been added into the mix using zram and zram-generator.
• Manual partitioning has been re-worked (but released partially unfinished, the reason being it was impossible to release this version where this specific change was removed - as it's so intertwined with everything else that's been re-worked)

Detailed changelog

Parameters

• More static arguments have been added to the initialization making for a more traditional argument parsing of known arguments.
• --creds is a new argument that take the previous "users", "superusers" and "root-password" keys & values, this allows for separation of JSON machine configuration and user credentials which might want to be stored separately for security reasons.
• --disk_layouts is a new argument that takes the previous structure of "harddrive" which later was renamed "harddrives". The old JSON structure of "harddrives" still remains in the --config input as an indicator of which harddrives to use and find from --disk_layouts.
• --dry-run has been added, which will abort before any changes are made on hardware. This allows for generating a configuration file which can then be passed to either of --config, --creds and --disk_layouts.
• --mount-point has been added to enable choosing where the installed system gets mounted during installation/configuration.
• --plugin has been added for loading external archinstall plugins via parameter.

Library changes

• archinstall/lib/disk.py has been split up into archinstall/lib/disk/*.py since it grew out of hand. The exposure of API calls should remain the same as they're exposed via __init__.py, but for contributors this change is worth noting when finding functions and files.
• Going from * imports to targeted imports. This should not cause issues, but if there's any API call not available do let us know.

General changes

• A dummy epoll() has been added in order to be able to run certain tests on Windows, for instance "reach mirror"-tests etc without causing import issues.
• archinstall.generate_password(length) has been added to generate a rudimentary password for disk encryption and other things. This using the secrets library and string.printable as a haystack.
• archinstall.json_dumps(*args, **kwargs) performs a safe json.dumps() call using the archinstall.JSON serializer
• archinstall.UNSAFE_JSON() has been added to serialize JSON structures without consideration of private information.
• archinstall.SysCommandWorker() now outputs the stdout as-is, without any attempt to make it pretty.
• archinstall.SysCommandWorker() (and in extension, even SysCommand()) now logs all commands executed under /var/log/archinstall/cmd_history.txt for easier debugging and learning which commands we executed. Currently we don't filter anything, so there will be a lot of spam from parted() calls and lsblk multiple times "for no reason".
• archinstall.SysCommand() has support for retrieving slices using SysCommand("ls")[:10] for instance, where the output generated by the internal SysCommandWorker() call will be simplified into retrieving the final output and only the first 10 bytes in this example.
• archinstall.cpuinfo() has been created to return CPU information from /proc/cpuinfo in a more general sense
  • archinstall.has_amd_cpu() and archinstall.has_intel_cpu() now uses the above cpuinfo() call.
• archinstall.meminfo() has been created to return memory information from /proc/meminfo as a whole or a specific key if specified.
• archinstall.graphics_devices() now correctly catches " 3D " entries from lspci correctly.
• archinstall.cpu_vendor() now uses cpuinfo() instead.
• archinstall.cpu_model() now uses cpuinfo() instead
• archinstall.sys_vendor() has been added which returns the vendor as specified by /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/sys_vendor
• archinstall.product_name() has been added which returns the product name from /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name
• archinstall.mem_available() returns the available memory using meminfo()
• archinstall.mem_free() returns the available free memory using meminfo()
• archinstall.mem_total() returns the total amount of memory using meminfo()
• archinstall.virtualization() returns the used virtualization platform using systemd-detect-virt
• archinstall.sort_mirrorlist() has been added to sort the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist according to preference of URL prefix. Defaults to HTTPS before HTTP, while preserving origin of the servers in groups.
• archinstall.filter_mirrors_by_region() now takes the sort_order parameter, which uses the sort_mirrorlist() call to arrange mirrors in a preferred way.
• archinstall.use_mirrors() now correctly iterates over multiple regions to support multi-region support for mirror selection (menu system will be updated in the next release to offer this)
• archinstall.list_mirrors() also supports the sort_order parameter as previously mentioned.
• archinstall.storage has gotten three new keys, ENC_IDENTIFIER which is the prefix for all loopdevices upon opening encrypted volumes, DISK_TIMEOUTS is the time in seconds in which archinstall should sleep pending a retry of the same operation, DISK_RETRY_ATTEMPTS which is the amount of retries of the same disk operation before quitting (and usually exception-error out)
• archinstall.Boot() which can temporarily boot the installed system without having to reboot the running machine now properly avoids using output-pagers when outputting the terminal output which is read by archinstall. In the future, we will use --console=pipe instead of reading the stdout via "brute force"
• archinstall.Boot() no longer uses machinectl to run commands in the temporary boot environment, instead it uses systemd-run
• archinstall.select_encrypted_partitions() has been added to mark partitions as encrypted. In the future this function will allow for selecting and manipulating which partitions are encrypted or not. For now, when called it will mark all partitions (except /boot) as encrypted. There is no toggle for off in this release and no user-interaction.
• A bunch of language improvements throughout the output

Profiles and it's API

• archinstall.is_desktop_profile() has been added to determine whether or not a specific profile is of the category "desktop".
• archinstall.Profile().get_profile_description() has been added to return a profiles __description__ variable if one exists.
• cutefish has been added as a desktop environment.
• lightdm-gtk-greeter have changed to lightdm-deepin-greeter
• gnome-software-packagekit-plugin have been added to gnome in order to get the Gnome Software app to work properly
• ark has been added to KDE to allow for archive management
• xarchiver have been added to xfce4 to allow for archive management
• gvfs have been added to xfce4 to fix "trash"
• network-manager-applet added to xfce4 to allow for network management using NetworkManager

Guided installation changes

• archinstall.ask_for_swap() has been added as a API call, which is used in the guided installer to ask if the users wants swap or not.
• archinstall.ask_for_bootloader() have been modified to allow listing "advanced" boot loaders via the advanced_options= parameter.
• archinstall.ask_for_audio_selection() now defaults to pipewire instead of pulseaudio, but still supports choosing either or none.
• archinstall.ask_for_main_filesystem_format() now supports the advanced_options= parameter, which will unlock ntfs as the root filesystem (hidden and triggered by --advanced)
• archinstall.get_default_partition_layout() returns the "ideal" disk layout for one or more disk setups.
  • In turn, for single disk archinstall.suggest_single_disk_layout() has been added to suggest a single disk layout setup
  • For multi-disk setups archinstall.suggest_multi_disk_layout() has been added to suggest a multi-disk layout
• archinstall.manage_new_and_existing_partitions() has been added to handle the menu-operations and alternatives for manipulating and managing partitions during manual configuration. This feature is in an early stage and will contain bugs, dead code paths and other edge cases that we haven't picked up yet. We release it partially unfinished because this release is getting too big as it is and we need more user input. And finding the optimal layouts and suggestions are tricky. we strongly suggest manually partitioning the disk and using it "as is" if you want to get full control of partition layouts but we provide this tool as a test to see if it would be viable.
• General warnings have been added surrounding AMD, Intel and Nvidia hardware.
• Graphics driver defaults to All open-source (default) if no other option is given and a desktop profile has been selected.
• The guided installation will now log and output the relevant hardware specs, which we can use in support arrends assuming the user is willing to include the log when asking for support.
• load_config() has been added in guided to facilitate the setup of all the required arguments prior to running the installation steps.
• perform_filesystem_operations() have been added to deal with disk operations. A lot of the encryption and formatting have moved away from the guided core and in to the respective classes (see other parts of the release notes) to simplify the guided profile a bit and separate it's duties.
• perform_installation_steps() have been re-named to perform_installation() which now deals with mounting disk layouts and is cleaned up to only contain installation steps and no disk operations (other than mounting)

archinstall.Installer (and the installer.py file in general)

• archinstall.InstallationFile() has been added, which is a per-installation helper to create files using the with open() context with correct file permissions as seen by the installation. owner= will look up the user-id within the installation and set ownership upon closing.
• archinstall.accessibility_tools_in_use() returns if espeakup.service is active in the live medium, can be used to carry over functionality into the installed system.
• archinstall.Installer() now installs archinstall.__accessibility_packages__ when detected in use on the live medium.
• archinstall.Installer().partitions() returns any Partition() object in use under the installers mountpoint.
• archinstall.Installer().mount_ordered_layout() is a new function to mount a defined JSON structure of partitions and mountpoints, as well as meta-info such as encryption and passwords. This replaces the old way of setting up block devices, partitions and dealing with encryption.
• archinstall.Installer()
• archinstall.Installer().mount_ordered_layout() will create a encryption key on / (root) if multiple volumes are detected as encrypted. It will then add that encryption key in key-slot 1 on that encrypted volume. Where key-slot 0 will remain the overall encryption key used for the root device. This ensures a secure automatic-unlock key that the system can use during boot, but allows a fallback manual passphrase for manual mounting from say other operating system instances or recovery modes.
• archinstall.Installer().activate_ntp() has been replaced by archinstall.Installation().activate_time_syncronization() but the old function will live on for a version or two with a warning.
• archinstall.Installation().enable_espeakup() enables text to speech services in the installed system.
• archinstall.Installation().run_as() has been improved to deal with quote issues a bit better (still not perfect)
• archinstall.Installation().mkinitcpio() will now remove fsck in the HOOKS if ntfs is detected as the root filesystem.
• archinstall.Installation().setup_swap() is a new helper function to configure swap, currently only zram is supported.
• archinstall.Installation().add_bootloader() now correctly configurs and creates boot entries based on the selected kernels
• archinstall.Installation().add_bootloader() now has support for efistub when used with your own custom installation scripts or via passing the --advanced flag to archinstall.
• archinstall.Installation().chown() has been added as a convenience function to chown files inside the installation using the installation user-map.
• archinstall.Installation().create_file() is a wrapper for archinstall.InstallationFile().

archinstall.luks

• archinstall.luks2() has two new functions:
  • .add_key() which adds a keyfile to a slot on a existing encrypting volume
  • .crypttab() which creates a /etc/crypttab entry for a volume in the installation (the installation has to be passed to the function)

archinstall.BlockDevice

• More detailed output in __repr__ to represent the class object instance
• Now supports len() to get the amount of partitions on the block device.
• Now supports sorted() by comparing self.path against other objects .path.
• BlockDevice().partition_type returns the partition table type (GPT or MBR)
• BlockDevice().size has been added to return the size of the device in GB (not GiB)
• BlockDevice().bus_type has been added to return the type of underlying bus (nvme etc)
• BlockDevice().spinning has been added, returns True if the underlying physical device is a spinning device
• BlockDevice().free_space has been added to report how much available space is free on the device (still a bit buggy when no partitions exist)
• BlockDevice().largest_free_space has been added and reports the largest continuous free space on the block device.
• BlockDevice().first_free_sector has been added and reports the first free sector and is reported in MB, GB or other similar unit.
• BlockDevice().first_end_sector has been added and reports the first free sector closest to the first available end, also in units of MB etc (if partitions exist, it will report the last sector right before that partition)
• BlockDevice().get_partition(uuid) returns the Partition() object from the block device partitions table based on the uuid *(PARTUUID)` filter.

archinstall.Filesystem

• Filesystem().partuuid_to_index has been added to give the positional index (order) of a specific partition in relation to other partitions based on it's uuid (PARTUUID)
• Filesystem().load_layout has been added to load a specific partition layout, this function will be moved in the future to create better separation of duties, but in the large split/move/change this is where it ended up. The function takes a dictionary structure (see examples in the examples catalogue or generate with --dry-run) and converts it into disk and partition operations, such as mklabel, mkpart and encryption calls.
• Filesystem().add_partition() has been re-worked in a way to allow for more gracefully letting the kernel come up to speed. it will re-try grabbing the newly formed partitions PARTUUID for a set period of time before giving up.

archinstall.Partition

• A new __dump__ function has been added for use with archinstall.JSON serializer
• Partition().sector_size has been added to return the logical sector size
• Partition().start has been added to return the start sector from (sfdisk /path).start
• Partition().end has been added to return the end sector from (sfdisk /path).size
• Partition().size has been added as a read only property which returns the size of the partition in GB
• Partition().boot has been added and returns if the partition is set/marked as bootable
• Partition().partition_type has been added and returns the partition table type that this partition lives under
• Partition().uuid now features retrying the PARTUUID retrieval, as the kernel some times hands over to the user before certain disk operations are actually complete. These retry-attempts are configurable both in terms of delay-time between and amount of attempts.
• Partition()._safe_uuid() has been added as a compliment to .uuid but does not raise any exceptions and does not attempt to do any re-tries. This feature is meant to be a safe way to "get" the PARTUUID without halting other operations, such as printing information or representation of the Partition() object.
• Partition().format() has support for additional file systems
  • ext2
  • ntfs (as of writing, only works with the latest Linux kernel and not -lts kernels. And it's highly experimental and lacks fscheck, but its supported)
• Partition().format() now supports passing options such as compression or setting case-insensitivity via the JSON config or API calls.

btrfs and subvolumes

This feature is released as a BETA feature, do expect issues but feel free to try out the limited support for btrfs subvolumes and report feedback

• archinstall.mount_subvolume has been added as a helper function to mount a btrfs subvolume to a specific location
• archinstall.create_subvolume has been added as a helper function to create a subvolume on a existing btrfs mounted volume location

archinstall.lib.disk.helpers*, archinstall.lib.disk.user_guides* & archinstall.lib.disk.validators*

• archinstall.convert_size_to_gb() has been added and takes a size in bytes and converts it to gigabytes (I sure hope I get the convention right here, bytes to GB and not GiB).
• archinstall.sort_block_devices_based_on_performance() performs a rudimentary sort of block devices using an "algorithm" based on "performance".
• archinstall.filter_disks_below_size_in_gb() generates an iterator which filters out blockdevices based on a lowest GB number
• archinstall.select_largest_device() selects the largest disk from a collection of disks
• archinstall.convert_to_gigabytes(string) is a limited helper function to convert MB and TB to GB
• archinstall.get_mount_info() now supports more features
  • Traversing the targeted structure backwards when traverse=True.
  • Added return_real_path=True which when True returns two return values rather than the mount information alone, this is so that in junction with traverse it will return the path in which it found the mount information. /mnt/archinstall/opt/ for instance will not return any info, but /mnt/archinstall will so that's the path that will be returned together with the mount information at that location.
• archinstall.encrypted_partitions() generates an iterator containing all partition blobs in a JSON structure that are encrypted
• archinstall.find_partition_by_mountpoint() iterates a JSON structure and find the relative mountpoint, /boot for instance can be located (note: not /mnt/boot)
• archinstall.partprobe() A new helper function which simply calls partprobe
• archinstall.convert_device_to_uuid() A new helper function to convert /dev/sda or /dev/sda2 to a UUID (not PARTUUID)
• archinstall.suggest_single_disk_layout() Has been added and performs rudimentary guesswork to set up the best partition layout and/or subvolumes for the selected block device.
• archinstall.suggest_multi_disk_layout() Has been added and performs rudimentary guesswork to set up the best partition layout and/or subvolumes for multiple selected block devices.
• archinstall.valid_parted_position() Has been added as a validation function before sending start/end positions to parted
• archinstall.valid_fs_type() Has been added and replaces the previous Partition().format() of /dev/null to detect if a file system is valid or not. Instead, this function will perform a static lookup of hardcoded and supported file systems.

Building and contributing

• Updated flake8 to be a bit more strict but stay in line with our contribution guidelines allowing some flexibility to the code.
• Added automatic ISO builds based on the official Arch Linux ISO configuration releng for GitLab, this in perparation for the potential/eventual move to GitLab for all Arch Linux related projects.
• Automatic build of man pages in the PKGBUILD