Arch Linux Image Builder for Google Compute Engine

This project provides a script that creates an Arch Linux image that can run on Google Compute Engine.

The image is configured to be as close as possible to a base Arch Linux installation, while still allowing it to be fully functional and optimized for Compute Engine. Notable choices made and differences compared to a standard Arch Linux installation are the following:

• systemd-boot is used with a UEFI-based boot and a GPT partition table.
• systemd-networkd is used to manage networks.
• systemd-resolved is used to manage resolv.conf (DNS).
• systemd-timesyncd is enabled and configured to synchronize time using the Compute Engine metadata server.
• Serial console logging is enabled from kernel command line and journald is configured to forward to it.
• Block multiqueue is configured from the kernel command line to optimize Compute Engine disk performance.
• A minimal initcpio is configured for booting on Compute Engine virtual machines.
• Root filesystem is ext4. Root partition and filesystem are automatically extended at boot using systemd-repart and systemd-growfs, to support dynamic disk resizing.
• Locale is set to en_GB.UTF-8
• Timezone is set to UTC.
• An OpenSSH server is installed and enabled, with root login and password authentication forbidden. User SSH keys are deployed and managed automatically by the Linux Guest Environment as described in the corresponding documentation.
• Sudo is installed. Permission to use sudo is managed automatically by Linux Guest Environment.

An additional Pacman repository, build.kilabit.info, is used to install and keep the Linux Guest Environment packages up to date. List of installed Linux Guest Environment packages and link to their corresponding AUR repository,

• google-cloud-ops-agent
• google-compute-engine
• google-compute-engine-oslogin
• google-guest-agent

Prebuilt Images

You can use Cloud SDK to create instances with the latest prebuilt Arch Linux image. To do that follow the SDK installation procedure, and then run the following command:

$ gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE_NAME \
      --image-project=kilabit --image-family=arch

List of latest images is available here, build and updated once a week (usually at Saturday morning at 01:00 UTC).

Build Your Own Image

You can build the Arch Linux image yourself with the following procedure:

1. Install the required dependencies and build the image

   console $ sudo pacman -S --needed arch-install-scripts dosfstools e2fsprogs $ git clone https://github.com/shuLhan/compute-archlinux-image-builder.git $ cd compute-archlinux-image-builder $ sudo ./build-arch-gce

   If the build is successful, this will create an image file named arch-v$DATE.tar.gz in the current directory, where $DATE is the current date.

2. Install and configure the Cloud SDK.

3. Create new storage bucket to copy the image, or you can use the existing one. For example, this one create bucket in region asia-southeast1 under project $PROJECT_NAME.

   ```console $ gcloud storage buckets create gs://$BUCKET_NAME \ --default-storage-class=standard \ --location=asia-southeast1 \ --project=$PROJECT_NAME \ --uniform-bucket-level-access

   ```

4. Copy the local image file to Google Cloud Storage:

   console $ gcloud storage cp arch-v$DATE.tar.gz gs://$BUCKET_NAME/arch-v$DATE.tar.gz

5. Import the image file to Google Compute Engine as a new custom image:

   console $ gcloud compute images create $IMAGE_NAME \ --family=arch \ --guest-os-features=GVNIC,UEFI_COMPATIBLE,VIRTIO_SCSI_MULTIQUEUE \ --project=$PROJECT_NAME \ --source-uri=gs://$BUCKET_NAME/arch-v$DATE.tar.gz

You can now create new instances with your custom image:

$ gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE_NAME --image=$IMAGE_NAME

The image in storage file is no longer needed, so you can delete it if you want:

$ gcloud storage rm --all-versions gs://$BUCKET_NAME/arch-v$DATE.tar.gz

Testing with qemu

Change the owner of disk or tar.gz file to your own user and then run

$ ./qemu.sh <disk | image-name>

Contributing Changes

See CONTRIB.md.

Licensing

All files in this repository are under the Apache License, Version 2.0 unless noted otherwise.

Support

Google LLC does not provide any support, guarantees, or warranty for this project or the images provided.