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The power is out and my laptop has less than 10% battery left?
It’s pacman -Syu time.
Exactly my thoughts as well.
Why update on that little battery life left… the power will return sooner or later, going without updates even for a week or two is no real problem. Hell, I update like once every 3 weeks to a month, it’s not that big of a deal.
I update always after a session, meaning about once a month 😂I don’t really need my PC, lol
Wait if the power is out, how do they have Internet to load new packages? Something doesn’t make sense here
It first downloads all packages from net, then it proceed totally offline starting by verifying downloaded files, signatures, extracting new packages and finally rebuilding initramfs.
Because arch is replacing the kernel and inittamfs in-place there is a chance that it will not boot if interrupted.
This issue was long resolved on other distro.
One way to mitigate it is by having multiple kernels (like LTS or hardened) that you can always pick in grub if the main one fail.
This issue was solved on Slackware in 1993.
It installs a “huge” kernel that contains all drivers to run on almost any hardware by default, alongside the “generic” kernel with only the modules you need. If the generic kernel fails to boot, you always have the backup, which is known to work, cause it’s the kernel you first boot into after installation.I’m not familiar with slackware but why is specific kernel called generic, while generic one is not called generic? I’m puzzled
I have no idea either.
Edit: Did some reading. “Linux-generic” is just the name of the linux kernel that is used in most computers (as opposed to Linux-realtime, which is the only other Linux kernel that’s still relevant).
Cable internet tends to stay online even if your power is out. You’d need a battery backup for your modem/router, but it is possible to stay online. Houses can be clever like that, almost all of your utilities will partially work, even when service is interrupted.
That depends on the ISP having backup batteries for their equipment. It will usually only last a couple of hours. 5G will usually stay up for a few days. For longer outages, you will need satellite internet and lots of fuel for your generator.
shutdown a computer when you shouldn’t computer breaks
how could a computer do this
Why would Arch do this?
- Boot to usb
- Mount your root filesystem
arch-chrootyour mounted root filesystem- mount
/boot mkinitcpio -p linux
Steps 1,2 and 3 are the entry way to solve all “unbootable Arch” problems by the way, presuming you know what needs to be changed to fix it of course.
I’d gladly take an Arch wiki article
For a while, I had to do this after every kernel update
Turns out, i accidentally had two
/bootfolders. One was is own partition, and the other was on the rootfs partition. When Arch booted, the separate partition was mounted over the rootfs/bootdir, “shadowing” itExcept, UEFI / GRUB was still pointing to the rootfs partition. So when pacman installed a kernel update, it wasn’t able to update the kernel that UEFI was booting, but it was able to update the kernel modules
Kernel no likey when kernel modules are newer than the kernel itself
This is why you keep a backup kernel
shutdown
‘shut down’, here. ‘Shutdown’ is a noun missing a hyphen.
MFW I say more than “L2S” and get downvoted by projectors.
Ive been here. U can use a bootable usb to boot. Then use switch root to change to ur actual filesystem (I’m glossing over a lot of complications here ask chatgpt) and update from here or just copy over the kernal.
ask chatgpt
You mean read the Arch wiki?
I’m not even an Arch user (I use Debian and Fedora) but the Arch wiki is amazing.
I mean ask the self hosted dolphin finetuned mistral 8x22b but chatgpt is easyer to say.
Why the fuck are you asking an LLM to help you fix your Linux install – especially a tiny one that gets facts wrong as often as Dolphin does – when archwiki is right there?
When I used Arch I updated once and it removed the running kernel and its modules. So when I plugged in a webcam it didn’t work, since the module was gone.
Not a catastrophe, but it was an off-putting user experience coming from Debian. Arch felt more like a desktop OS, Debian feels more like a server OS to me (updates generally warn/confirm when you need to restart services or the machine).
To each their own! Having more up to date stuff was a nice perk of running Arch, certainly.
Debian and Fedora are solid on the desktop
Oh I love Debian on the desktop! More a comment on the feeling of the OS being very concerned about downtime and stability, with minimal “surprises.” Not a bad thing at all!
This got me looking to see if there is any way to have a fallback as I have had something similar happen to me.
The general advice is to have a liveboot USB around. I even saw that you can have GRUB simply boot from an .iso file on the internal drives, which eliminates the need to keep a USB stick around.
I haven’t followed the steps yet but I’ll give this a shot because it intrigues me.
https://www.linuxbabe.com/desktop-linux/boot-from-iso-files-using-grub2-boot-loader
I always have a separate huge kernel on hand that boots without an initrd.
Or you could just install NixOS for update rollbacks (or use zfs/btrfs and set an alias to take snapshots whenever you update)
can I take systemd with me?
I think I didn’t make it clear enough: My laptop was on the power during the update process, when the power randomly cut out - for the first time in about 6 years, it doesn’t happen often. Of course you can interpret it as user error - but I think it’s reasonable to update my system when plugged into, normally reliable power. The laptop battery is pretty much dead, so it would’ve shut itself down automatically anyway.
How dead are we talking here? Even on an older laptop a kernel update doesn’t take that long. Should have just kept it going, hoping for the best.
I don’t really get why you couldn’t pick one of your other installed kernels and boot that, but you seem pretty intent on blaming arch and I don’t feel like trying to troubleshoot it, so that’s that I guess.
sure, but what os wouldn’t break if you did this?
If it was on something like BTRFS it’d probably be fine, though I imagine there’s still a small window where the FS could flush while the file is being written.
renameat2has the EXCHANGE flag to atomically switch 2 files, so if arch maintainers want to fix it they could do- Write to temporary file
- Fsync temporary file
- Renameat2 EXCHANGE temporary and target
- Fsync directory (optional, since a background flush would still be atomic, just might take some time)
it was btrfs.
Just having btrfs is not enough, you need to have automatic snapshots (or do them manually) before doing updates and configured grub to allow you to rollback.
Personally, I’m to lazy to configure stuff like that, I rather just pick my Vetroy USB from backpack, boot into live image and just fix it (while learning something/new interesting) than spend time preventing something that might never happen to me :)
Plus in Linux you can actually fix this with a live USB, while on Windows you can run startup repair and hope for the best.
In Windows you can also fix this with a live Windows USB, manually.
Any immutable distro, Debian, Ubuntu, all their derivatives, Fedora, all its derivatives, OpenSUSE, Slackware, …
Basically, 95+% of installed Linux systems would retain the old or a backup kernel during an upgrade.Any immutable distro, Debian, Ubuntu, all their derivatives
Debian and Ubuntu are not immutable distributions by default, unless I am mistaken.
“Arch is stable”
It is! My Desktop hardly ever topples over!
When talking about Linux, “stable” usually means “doesn’t have major changes often”, or in other words, “doesn’t have lots of updates that break stuff”. That’s why “Debian stable” is called that. Arch is not that.
So I’m trying to understand if you think that shutting down an update during regenerating the initramfs indicates that Arch isn’t stable? Because that’s a FAFO move and would crater any non-atomic update distro.
