testsAndMisc/linux_configuration/boot_recovery/README.md
Krzysztof kuhy Rudnicki 4f2b0ccdf7 Dissolve linux_configuration/scripts/ and single_use/
Two levels of pure taxonomy carrying no information, and a 2-directory
cap leaves no room for them. Categories now sit directly under
linux_configuration/: features, fixes, utils, misc, fresh-install,
installers, diagnostics, gaming, boot_recovery, periodic_background, lib,
meta, tests. A script's own lib/ and tests/ are exempt from the cap, so
those stay put.

Depth violations 248 -> 139; roughly 40 of the remainder are inside
digital_wellbeing and hosts, deferred until the guard-lib repoint.

The moves are the easy half. What breaks is every path that counted
levels, and three classes of it had to be found by resolving paths rather
than reading diffs:

  - 52 relative `source` lines for lib/common.sh and lib/android.sh. The
    correct prefix differs per file: 40 were ../../ and 12 were ../../../,
    so a blanket replace would have fixed one set and broken the other.
  - REPO_ROOT in 7 fixes/lib/tests harnesses and setup_syncyomi_guard.sh,
    each walking up four levels from a directory now two levels shallower.
    This caused a real regression -- the fixes suite went red with
    "log_warn: command not found" -- caught by running it and comparing
    against the pre-move baseline worktree.
  - conftest.py's sys.path entries, which took the pytest gate down with
    14 collection errors, and the `# shellcheck source=` directives, which
    took shellcheck down with SC1091.

16 symlinks in $HOME broke, including the entire i3blocks bar. All
repointed, and cpu_monitor/memory/disk/time/volume were run to confirm
they emit real output rather than merely resolving.

Verified: 1798 tests pass at 100% coverage, 8 of 9 lib/tests suites pass
(the ninth needs the coverage jail, identically at baseline), pre-commit
is clean, and the two untracked secret configs are still ignored after
their gitignore paths changed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PJrqKERAo5QUeEHWS5Asgp
2026-08-23 18:53:30 +02:00

4.5 KiB

boot-repair

Offline recovery for a stale EFI System Partition — the failure that dropped this laptop into emergency mode on 2026-07-30.

The failure it fixes

A kernel upgrade replaced /usr/lib/modules/<old> with <new>, but the new kernel image never reached the ESP. The firmware kept booting the old vmlinuz, whose module tree no longer existed, so nothing modular could load after pivot-root. vfat was among the casualties — which meant /boot itself could not be mounted, local-fs.target failed, and systemd dropped to emergency mode. pacman reported the upgrade as successful.

Root cause on this machine: pacman-git with ParallelDownloads > 1 makes every forked alpm hook child segfault (SIGSEGV in libc), silently skipping 90-mkinitcpio-install and depmod.

Install

sudo ./install.sh

Installs:

Path Purpose
/usr/local/sbin/boot-repair the repair tool
/etc/pacman.d/hooks/05-boot-mounted-guard.hook pre-transaction gate
/etc/pacman.d/hooks/99-boot-autorepair.hook post-transaction auto-repair

It lives on the root filesystem by necessity: the ESP is unreachable by definition when this is needed.

Use

sudo boot-repair              # repair now (default)
sudo boot-repair --dry-run    # report only, change nothing

From the systemd emergency shell the root filesystem is already mounted, so:

/usr/local/sbin/boot-repair

No network is used at any point. Missing kernel modules are recovered from /var/cache/pacman/pkg.

Options

Flag Meaning
--dry-run Report problems, change nothing
--preflight Exit non-zero unless the ESP is mounted (used by the gate hook)
--auto Quiet repair for the post-transaction hook
--root DIR Operate on another root (fixtures, or an Arch ISO chroot)
--esp DEVICE Override ESP auto-detection

Exit status: 0 consistent/repaired, 1 problems remain, 2 usage error.

What it checks and repairs

  1. Root filesystem read-only after a failed boot → remount rw
  2. noauto/nofail on /boot in fstab → reset to defaults (backed up). nofail turns a loud emergency drop into a silent boot of a stale kernel, which is strictly worse.
  3. Orphaned kernel files written into the unmounted /boot → delete
  4. vfat unloadable → restore fs/fat + fs/nls from the cached kernel package, depmod, modprobe
  5. ESP not mounted → mount it
  6. Missing modules.dep → depmod
  7. ESP kernel ≠ newest complete module tree → install the kernel
  8. initramfs ≠ that kernel → mkinitcpio -P
  9. ParallelDownloads > 1 → set to 1 (the root cause)

A module tree counts as usable only if it has both vmlinuz and kernel/. The wreckage this bug leaves behind is a directory holding only modules.* metadata, and a naive "newest directory" pick would choose it.

Safety invariants

  • Files under /boot are deleted only while it is not a mountpoint and contains no EFI/ or loader/. Deleting after mounting would destroy the real kernel.
  • EFI/ and loader/ are never written or removed.
  • The running kernel's module tree is never deleted.
  • No network, ever.

Tests

./tests/test_boot_repair.sh     # 31 fixture tests, no root needed
sudo ./tests/live_test.sh       # 11 live tests, reversible

live_test.sh refuses to start unless the system is already consistent, and an EXIT trap remounts the ESP however it ends. It covers what fixtures cannot: the pre-transaction gate, unmounting the real ESP, and deleting shadow files off the real root filesystem while proving the ESP survives.

Verified behaviour

  • 31/31 fixture tests, 11/11 live tests, shellcheck clean
  • Gate proven to abort a real kernel transaction with the ESP unmounted: error: failed to commit transaction, no packages upgraded, nothing written into the unmounted /boot

Limitation

If the running kernel's package is not in /var/cache/pacman/pkg, step 4 is impossible offline. The script says so and prints the Arch-ISO chroot recovery commands rather than guessing.