Arctic Linux - Alpha 2.5

Arctic Linux Alpha 2.5 — Arctic-linux-a2.5.iso, x86_64, 695 MiB.

The boot could look hung for twenty seconds with no warning

The coldplug step - "load a driver for every device already present," added
back when the live image had no network at all - walks every modalias
under /sys/devices and runs a separate modprobe for each. A real machine
can have several hundred of these, fully serial, one process fork per device,
and the step printed nothing at all between "Loading kernel modules" and
finishing - which on real hardware took about twenty seconds of a completely
dead screen. That is exactly the shape of a hung boot, and exactly how you
end up holding the power button on a machine that was working the entire
time.

It's backgrounded now and prints a dot once a second while it runs, the same
way wifi-connect's own silent wifi scan already does - a heartbeat instead
of silence.

PAM is packaged

Linux-PAM, library and the standard module set, built against libressl's
absence on purpose (no openssl feature - Arctic links libressl everywhere
and a second TLS library under pam_timestamp was never worth it), with
docs/selinux/audit/nis/logind/elogind off since none of those are packaged.

It's on every install now, in PKGS_MAIN. Nothing is built against it yet -
busybox's login and su need no authentication stack at all, and stay
exactly as they are; see the a2.2 notes for what happened the one time
something here linked libpam without it being packaged on the system at
all. This is what unblocks ly and anything else that wants PAM, without
touching what already works.

Known

• gmp-alt has no binary package, so nftables cannot install and the
  firewall does not come up.
• No web browser; firefox, librewolf, chromium and qutebrowser all need Rust.
• No audio — wireplumber will not build against the packaged lua.
• No terminfo database, so tput does not work.
• ly is not packaged yet - PAM being on the system now is what it was
  waiting on.
• initialization freezes at boot; not diagnosed yet.

Install

dd if=Arctic-linux-a2.5.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Run wifi-connect if you need wireless, edit /etc/arctic/install.conf, run
arctic-install.