Hi, I noticed the pre-built image calls for a 100 GB disk image. Is there any way this could be a 10-ish GB image like the other standard ones? I realize I can build my own but I was thinking others might want a smaller boot disk also.

faddat_gmail_com@instance-1:~/compute-archlinux-image-builder$ sudo ./build-arch-on-gce.sh --upload=gs://archisfresh/archlinux
12202014.tar.gz
Creating VM to build Arch Linux
Creating Instance, archbuilder24870
usage: gcloud compute instances create NAME [NAME ...] [optional flags]
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) argument --metadata: key/value pair must be of the form KEY=VALUE; received: script-p
arams=--upload=gs://archisfresh/archlinux12202014.tar.gz

Figured that tossing the = in there would resolve it, but it did not. I'm going to try building it "locally" on the current GCE instance. Will keep appraised if I suddenly have an epiphany....

During run of sudo ./build-arch-gce, two warnings and one error are reported:

( 3/13) Warn about old perl modules
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
( 4/13) Updating journal message catalog...
( 5/13) Reloading system manager configuration...
Running in chroot, ignoring request: daemon-reload
( 6/13) Updating udev hardware database...
( 7/13) Applying kernel sysctl settings...
( 8/13) Creating system user accounts...
( 9/13) Creating temporary files...
error: command failed to execute correctly
(10/13) Reloading device manager configuration...
Running in chroot, ignoring request.
(11/13) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(12/13) Updating the info directory file...
(13/13) Rebuilding certificate stores...

How can they be fixed? I am asking it here simply because I can't grok pervasively used gawk commands in short time.

Testing it out now. If it works, then I'm going to be mighty curious to learn what other platforms I can use this for. Thanks for your work!

$:gsutil ls -l gs://gce-arch-images/*.tar.gz
AccessDeniedException: 403 Forbidden

It would be really nice to be able to look at the images in the bucket... without having to go to and read README.md.

The public can read / list individual images:

$:gsutil ls -l gs://gce-arch-images/arch-v20160502.tar.gz
 651521944  2016-05-02T06:55:43Z  gs://gce-arch-images/arch-v20160502.tar.gz
TOTAL: 1 objects, 651521944 bytes (621.34 MiB)

but not the bucket as a whole.

Can we set the R bit here- or whatever the equivalent is for GCS buckets (READER role for allAuthenticatedUsers)?

I created a custom VPC network with IPv6 support today and configured my old instance to use it.

Although ip a s eth0 shows that the interface has an external IPv6 address, I cannot reach any public IPv6 addresses. For example, ping -6 dns.google prints ping: connect: Network is unreachable.

Then I created a new instance using the ubuntu-2204-jammy-v20220528 image and everything worked fine. This makes me think that my old instance (created about two years ago) might have some unknown problem. So I used this project to create a new instance:

$ gcloud compute instances create archlinux-ipv6-test --image-project arch-linux-gce --image-family arch --network-interface subnet=custom,stack-type=IPV4_IPV6

Everything worked fine until I rebooted the instance with sudo reboot. And after reboot ip a s eth0 shows no external IPv6 address.

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, are there any other steps I need to do? Or does this project not support IPv6 yet?

Hi all,
I just used latest image (v20160502) but build can not install some packages/do a full system upgrade due to package archlinux-keyring being missed.

Installing vim for example gives the error of:
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/vim-runtime-8.0.1436-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).

After installing keyring (pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring) everything works fine.

Is there a way to generate a new build and ask for a PR? (I honestly didn't look really further on how to do find that info)

There were some updates made public for the Linux Kernel and Systemd today. Ever since running said updates, anything which has multiple lines of output seem to crash the ssh connection.

An easy example to replicate is running dmesg.

I tested out the newest updates on my home server and everything worked great.

Hi folks,

Thanks for maintaining the Arch Linux image! I really appreciate it.

I might be doing something wrong, but it seems like creating an instance with a local SSD causes the SSH server to never come online. The "SSH" button on the control panel doesn't ever connect either, and the page to view the serial output just shows an error saying it "failed to load."

gcloud compute instances create mymachinename --image-project=arch-linux-gce --image-family=arch --local-ssd interface=nvme

... same results using interface=scsi.

Thanks,
Ryan

It is a little harder to get started with the latest image as it has become over a year old. I did the following to get started:

1. resolve key errors when updating the system by first updating

$ sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring

2. resolve the mirror errors by updating the mirror list using a technique from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/mirrors#Sorting_mirrors

Thanks for this project. I have found it very helpful over the years.

As the image becomes UEFI-based, we can safely replace GRUB with systemd-boot to make the setup simpler and more robust.
GRUB is known to be complex, and it is easy to be broken if we update the kernel without regenerating its config. Its recent update even breaks in some situation if we didn't reinstall it.
Systemd-boot is simpler, and its configs can be written by hands, which enables us to manually fix it without chrooting. Also, because we don't need to deal with various hardware environments, we don't need the complexity of GRUB.
All in all, I think systemd-boot is a better choice for using with GCE than GRUB.

It complains :

passwd: Module is unknown
passwd: password unchanged

Long story short, as of 12JAN2017, this script fails as follows:

user@gapps-project-name:~/compute-archlinux-image-builder$ ./build-arch-on-gce.sh --upload gs://cmh-custom-utilities.appspot.com/archlinux.tar.gz
Your active configuration is: [cloudshell-2036]
Creating VM to build Arch Linux
Creating Instance, archbuilder28275
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) unrecognized arguments:
  instance-name=archbuilder28275
  instance-zone=us-central1-f
  git-source-uri=https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-archlinux-image-builder.git
  storage-full
You can monitor progress of the build via:
  gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output archbuilder28275 --zone us-central1-f | grep startupscript

user@gapps-project-name:~/compute-archlinux-image-builder$

Nothing appears to be built and upon further reading online it seems the syntax and options used in build-arch-on-gce.sh have gone deprecated.

So when I click on the glorious "ssh" button in the console, no dice. It tells me that port 22 is not open. Anyone have the miracle cure?

Any hope for BTRFS as root instead of ext4?

Currently the public image for project arch-linux-gce does not have the UEFI_COMPATIBLE flag, only VIRTIO_SCSI_MULTIQUEUE:

$ gcloud compute images describe-from-family arch --project=arch-linux-gce
archiveSizeBytes: '810095680'
creationTimestamp: '2022-03-15T12:36:46.018-07:00'
description: Arch Linux built on 20220315.
diskSizeGb: '10'
family: arch
guestOsFeatures:
- type: VIRTIO_SCSI_MULTIQUEUE
id: '6771268489385432098'
kind: compute#image
labelFingerprint: 42WmSpB8rSM=
name: arch-v20220315
rawDisk:
  containerType: TAR
  source: ''
selfLink: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/arch-linux-gce/global/images/arch-v20220315
sourceType: RAW
status: READY
storageLocations:
- us

According to documentation [1], an UEFI image add several advantages: secure boot, Virtual Trusted Platform Module, and Integrity monitoring.

Another advantages is to allow user to swap the boot disk from non-arch linux with UEFI_COMPATIBLE to new arch-linux image. For example, here is an error when replacing centos-8 boot disk with arch,

>>> local:  35: gcloud [compute disks create demo-root --zone=asia-southeast1-b --image-project=arch-linux-gce --image-family=arch --type=pd-ssd --size=10GB]
Created [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/<redacted>/zones/asia-southeast1-b/disks/demo-root].
NAME                 ZONE               SIZE_GB  TYPE    STATUS
demo-root  asia-southeast1-b  10       pd-ssd  READY

>>> local:  43: gcloud [compute instances attach-disk demo --zone=asia-southeast1-b --disk=demo-root --boot]
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.attach-disk) Could not fetch resource:
 - UEFI setting must be the same for the instance and the boot disk.

Question: how to create an image with UEFI_COMPATIBLE enable?

Request: enable UEFI_COMPATIBLE on public image.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images/create-delete-deprecate-private-images#guest-os-features

Any reason systemd-networkd is not used (which is inbuilt) instead of dhclient (which is an external package needs to be installed?). I was wondering if there is any issue with it in gcp I need to be aware of as I am planning to use for a different purpose.

As the script in this repository is outdated (and does not work due "makepkg --asroot" issue), I'm using a newer version from this repo:

https://github.com/jeremyje/compute-archlinux-image-builder

As there is not possible to report an issue, and I see you are the same author on both repositories I'll post the question here.

At the end of the image creation the script breaks with this output:

DEBUG: ['tar', '-Szcf', '/opt/ssasa/compute-archlinux-image-builder/arch-v20150526.tar.gz', 'disk.raw']
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./build-gce-arch.py", line 244, in
main()
File "./build-gce-arch.py", line 62, in main
utils.DeleteDirectory(workspace_dir)
File "/opt/ssasa/compute-archlinux-image-builder/utils.py", line 169, in DeleteDirectory
shutil.rmtree(dir_path)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/shutil.py", line 464, in rmtree
_rmtree_safe_fd(fd, path, onerror)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/shutil.py", line 402, in _rmtree_safe_fd
_rmtree_safe_fd(dirfd, fullname, onerror)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/shutil.py", line 398, in _rmtree_safe_fd
onerror(os.open, fullname, sys.exc_info())
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/shutil.py", line 396, in _rmtree_safe_fd
dirfd = os.open(name, os.O_RDONLY, dir_fd=topfd)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'gcearch1c0309o6'

According to https://www.isc.org/dhcp/, ISC has announced the end of life for ISC DHCP (dhclient) as of the end of 2022. So we should move to a more up-to-date DHCP daemon like dhcpcd.

Thanks for providing this useful tool! I installed via the AUR package. I needed the following diff to successfully build an image as of today on a manjaro base system:

diff /usr/bin/build-arch-gce /tmp/build-arch-gce                                                                                                                                         ✔  owen@titan
79c79
<       base linux dosfstools e2fsprogs dhclient openssh sudo google-compute-engine
---
>       base linux61 dosfstools e2fsprogs dhclient openssh sudo google-compute-engine
174,176c174,177
<               { print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset
<       rm /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
<       mkinitcpio --nocolor --preset linux
---
>               { print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux61.preset
>       rm -f /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
>         ls -l /etc/mkinitcpio.d/
>       mkinitcpio --nocolor --preset linux61

hope this helps to others.

What is the default root password when this image is created?

google cloud says the image is read only and doesn't create it properly.

The "--asroot" option is no longer supported, which causes the script stopped at installing AUR packages.

I cannot access the bucket for the prebuilt images. Perhaps there is a permission problem?

I'm trying to build from a brand new Linode Arch VM.

I tried to fix it but it seems I don't know Arch enough...

Generation complete.
-- Configuring journald.
-- Configuring ssh.
-- Configuring pacman.
-- Enabling other services.
-- Configuring initcpio.
gawk: inplace:53: warning: inplace::begin: Cannot stat `/etc/mkinitcpio.conf' (No such file or directory)

gawk: inplace:53: fatal: cannot open file `/etc/mkinitcpio.conf' for reading (No such file or directory)

Error: gawk -i assert -i inplace ' /^MODULES=/ { $0 = "MODULES=(virtio_pci virtio_scsi sd_mod ext4)"; ++f1 } /^BINARIES=/ { $0 = "BINARIES=(fsck fsck.ext4)"; ++f2 } /^HOOKS=/ { $0 = "HOOKS=(base modconf)"; ++f3 } { print } END { assert(f1 * f2 * f3 == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/mkinitcpio.conf exited with status 2
Error: arch-chroot -- "$mount_dir" /bin/bash -s -- "$loop_dev" <<-'EOS' set -eEuo pipefail trap 'echo "Error: \$BASH_COMMAND` exited with status $?"' ERR

echo "-- Configuring time."
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^#NTP=/ { $0 = "NTP=metadata.google.internal"; ++f }
{ print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
systemctl --quiet enable systemd-timesyncd

echo "-- Configuring locale."
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^#en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8\s*$/ { $0 = substr($0, 2); ++f }
{ print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo 'LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/locale.conf

echo "-- Configuring journald."
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^#ForwardToConsole=/ { $0 = "ForwardToConsole=yes"; ++f }
{ print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/systemd/journald.conf

echo "-- Configuring ssh."
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^#PasswordAuthentication / { $0 = "PasswordAuthentication no"; ++f1 }
/^#PermitRootLogin / { $0 = "PermitRootLogin no"; ++f2 }
{ print } END { assert(f1 * f2 == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
systemctl --quiet enable sshd

echo "-- Configuring pacman."
curl --silent --show-error -o /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
'https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?country=all&ip_version=4&use_mirror_status=on'
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^#Server / { $0 = substr($0, 2); ++f }
{ print } END { assert(f > 0, "f > 0") }' /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
cat <<-'EOF' > /etc/systemd/system/pacman-init.service
[Unit]
Description=Pacman keyring initialization
ConditionDirectoryNotEmpty=!/etc/pacman.d/gnupg

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman-key --init
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman-key --populate archlinux

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
systemctl --quiet enable pacman-init

echo "-- Enabling other services."
systemctl --quiet enable
dhclient@ens4 rngd growpartfs@-
google-accounts-daemon google-clock-skew-daemon google-instance-setup
google-network-daemon google-shutdown-scripts google-startup-scripts

echo "-- Configuring initcpio."
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^MODULES=/ { $0 = "MODULES=(virtio_pci virtio_scsi sd_mod ext4)"; ++f1 }
/^BINARIES=/ { $0 = "BINARIES=(fsck fsck.ext4)"; ++f2 }
/^HOOKS=/ { $0 = "HOOKS=(base modconf)"; ++f3 }
{ print } END { assert(f1 * f2 * f3 == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
gawk -i assert -i inplace '
/^PRESETS=/ { $0 = "PRESETS=(default)"; ++f }
/#?fallback_/ { next }
{ print } END { assert(f == 1, "f == 1") }' /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset
rm /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
mkinitcpio --nocolor --preset linux

echo "-- Configuring grub."
grub-install --target=i386-pc -- "$1"
cat <<-'EOF' > /etc/default/grub
# GRUB boot loader configuration
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=ttyS0,38400n8 elevator=noop scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=Y"
GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="part_gpt part_msdos"
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=true
EOF
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
EOS
` exited with status 2

• Cleaning up.

We're using arch linux in our CI farm since the deprecation of flatcar earlier this year. So far everything was running fine, but starting from today I'm getting the following output whenever a new machine is provisioned via docker-machine:

sudo: hostname: command not found

I digged into the code of docker-machie and it looks like it is expecting the hostname binary to be present in order to set the hostname:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/docker-machine/-/blob/master/libmachine/provision/generic.go#L41

func (provisioner *GenericProvisioner) SetHostname(hostname string) error {
	if _, err := provisioner.SSHCommand(fmt.Sprintf(
		"sudo hostname %s && echo %q | sudo tee /etc/hostname",
		hostname,
		hostname,
	)); err != nil {
		return err
	}

The binary is however no longer present. I saw that you changed something yesterday on master which might have triggered an image rebuild. Are you aware of a change so that inetutils (the package that provides hostname) is now no longer present in the base install? (Sidemark: the laptop I've set up last week does not have it installed either)

I think the issue needs ultimately fixed in docker-machine, but the project is in maintenance mode. Hence, I'm wondering whether inetutils should be included in this image?

Second: Do you provide "old" arch linux images, e.g. the one that was still present on GCP yesterday?

First of all, huge thanks for this project, it really helped me a lot! I love this project! ❤️

However, I found that the default installed system is on the /dev/sda2 disk partition. Although this is okay, but OCD makes me want to ask if you guys have a way to make the default disk partition /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sda2 when installing the system (or when building the image)?

Hey!

I was trying to run the build script on an Arch compute engine machine, with gcloud installed and got an error. Not sure what it means :P

Thanks for the project!

#22 ❯❯❯ ./build-arch-on-gce.sh --upload gs://${BUCKET}/archlinux.tar.gz
Creating VM to build Arch Linux
Creating Instance, archbuilder17824
WARNING: We noticed that you are using space-separated lists, which are deprecated. Please transition to using comm
a-separated lists instead (try "--metadata script-params=--upload gs://bucket/archlinux.tar.gz,instance-name=a
rchbuilder17824,instance-zone=us-central1-f,git-source-uri=https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-archlinux
-image-builder.git"). If you intend to use [instance-name=archbuilder17824, instance-zone=us-central1-f, git-source
-uri=https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-archlinux-image-builder.git] as positional arguments, put the f
lags at the end.
WARNING: We noticed that you are using space-separated lists, which are deprecated. Please transition to using comm
a-separated lists instead (try "--scopes compute-rw,storage-full"). If you intend to use [storage-full] as position
al arguments, put the flags at the end.
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) Failed to find image for alias [ubuntu-14-10] in public image project [ubu
ntu-os-cloud].
You can monitor progress of the build via:
  gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output archbuilder17824 --zone us-central1-f | grep startupscript