Skip to content

Atomicity#

This is a work in progress!

First, an important detail:

  • Updates are indivisible transactions. They must fail or succeed as one, they can never be partially complete.

An example of this is a bookstore. If you try to buy a book with counterfeit money, the transaction will fail. If the book cannot be found, the transaction fails. In both cases you don't get a book.

If all is well however, you get the book and move on. The book transaction can never be partially complete. It has either failed or succeeded.

Therefore:

  • If an update fails, it is abandoned and never applied.

This transactional approach is called atomicity.

Every update is applied at boot using an initramfs hook through mkinitcpio.

The process works like this:

  1. The base filesystem is downloaded from the Arch mirrors and extracted.
  2. Packages from specified “track” in /system.yaml are installed, and custom commands are executed. At this point a second system has been created and is being manipulated.
  3. This new filesystem replaces your current one on the next boot.

Built with Material for MkDocs.