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
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
- Root filesystem read-only after a failed boot → remount rw
noauto/nofailon/bootin fstab → reset todefaults(backed up).nofailturns a loud emergency drop into a silent boot of a stale kernel, which is strictly worse.- Orphaned kernel files written into the unmounted
/boot→ delete vfatunloadable → restorefs/fat+fs/nlsfrom the cached kernel package,depmod,modprobe- ESP not mounted → mount it
- Missing
modules.dep→depmod - ESP kernel ≠ newest complete module tree → install the kernel
- initramfs ≠ that kernel →
mkinitcpio -P ParallelDownloads > 1→ set to1(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
/bootare deleted only while it is not a mountpoint and contains noEFI/orloader/. Deleting after mounting would destroy the real kernel. EFI/andloader/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,
shellcheckclean - 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.