ArchLinux ARM

Failure

Date: July 13th 2025

I did a fresh Arch install following the ARM installation guide, which recommended a 200M boot partition. When I ran pacman -Syu, it failed due to insufficient space. So I redid the partition scheme with a 1GB boot partition and reinstalled Arch. This time pacman -Syu succeeded (though it installed a lot of seemingly unnecessary packages), but the system ended up in a boot loop. So I decided to give up on Archlinux ARM.

I also want to point out the Armv7 installation instruction didn't work for me. I had to use aarch64 instruction mentioned at the bottom of the page.

I highly recommend going for Raspberry Pi OS Lite instead. It ships with raspi-config which will prove handy. Check out more: https://vectorspace.xyz/tech/raspberry-pi-3

Chipset: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B bcm2837rifbg

source: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3

Using fdisk create this partition scheme:

Device     Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1          2048  2099199  2097152    1G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2       2099200 62333951 60234752 28.7G 83 Linux

About the partition sheme

Setting 1G for boot deviates from the one the 200M set in original guide. I set it to 1G because 200M was too small, the first pacman -Syu failed citing insufficient space in boot partition.

Format partitions:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Mount the partitions:

mkdir boot root
mount /dev/sda1 boot
mount /dev/sda2 root

Download and extract the root filesystem:

Warning

Go for the 64bit (ArchLinuxARM-rpi-aarch64) and remember to unpack with bsdtar as root, not with sudo.

# wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-rpi-armv7-latest.tar.gz
wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-rpi-aarch64-latest.tar.gz

sudo su
bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-rpi-armv7-latest.tar.gz -C root

sync

Move boot files to the first partition:

mv root/boot/* boot

Unmount the two partitions:

umount boot root

Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect ethernet, and apply 5V power.

Use the serial console or SSH to the IP address given to the board by your router.

Defaut username and password

user name: alarm
password : alarm

username : root
passowrd : root

Initialize the pacman keyring and populate the Arch Linux ARM package signing keys:

pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate archlinuxarm

ArchLinux ARM

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