Installation system, partitioning and formatting

Booting from installation medium

Boot from installation iso, set up keymap and font for installation environment:

loadkeys de-latin1
setfont ter-132b

It’s recommended to use a Ventoy boot stick, as we’ll also rely on using a rEFInd boot loader later on. For that, you can just put the official refind boot img on the Ventoy stick you have.

Partitioning

For partition#ing, we use gdisk:

# gdisk /dev/nvme0n1

1. Delete all partitions by creating a new GPT partition table with o.
2. Then create partitions with this layout:

   Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048         2099199   1024.0 MiB  EF00  EFI system partition
   2         2099200         4196351   1024.0 MiB  EA00  XBOOTLDR partition
   3         4196352      3907028991   1.8 TiB     8304  ArchLinux-Crypt
   

3. Note new partitions can be created with n, printing works with p, and c allows to rename a partition.
4. Finally, write out the table with w.
5. Note that 8304 is required even for crypted volume to allow for GPT automounting.

Formatting disks

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p2
# Takes good defaults into account, may want to check sector size via https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Format#NVMe_solid_state_drives ...
cryptsetup luksFormat -s 512 /dev/nvme0n1p3
# Check with:
cryptsetup luksDump /dev/nvme0n1p3
cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p3 ArchLinux
mkfs.btrfs -O block-group-tree /dev/mapper/ArchLinux

Setup BTRFS

Setup BTRFS with separate volumes for rootfs and home for usage of btrbk:

mount --mkdir -t btrfs -o defaults,noatime,compress-force=zstd:6,ssd /dev/mapper/ArchLinux /mnt/btrfs_pool
btrfs subvol create /mnt/btrfs_pool/rootfs
btrfs subvol create /mnt/btrfs_pool/home
mkdir /mnt/btrfs_pool/_btrbk_snap
mount --mkdir -t btrfs -o defaults,noatime,compress-force=zstd:6,ssd,subvol=rootfs /dev/mapper/ArchLinux /mnt/rootfs
btrfs subvolume set-default /mnt/rootfs
mount --mkdir -t btrfs -o defaults,noatime,compress-force=zstd:6,ssd,subvol=home /dev/mapper/ArchLinux /mnt/rootfs/home
btrfs subvolume list /mnt/btrfs_pool
mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/rootfs/efi
mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/rootfs/boot