Arch-sandbox

A system that uses an "Overlay filesystem" for Sandbox on Arch Linux, with the potencial to work on other distributions and without depending on specific file systems

This repository as a whole is intended to be a guide for anyone who wants to use it. I might create a complete configuration tool later, but you can simply use the files provided here and adapt them as needed.

The idea is to use the Overlay filesystem to create a layer over the system root.

In this layer, complete updates or other modifications can be made, and upon restarting, it can boot from "arch-preview.efi". This allows testing the changes without affecting the actual system root, which is great for avoiding broken updates.

It doesn't depend on specific file systems or features like Snapshot.

The modifications can be merged with rsync, I will work on this more

The main code to make this bootable is in

operating flow

I use UKI boot directly, I don't use a bootloader, pay attention to this if you need to adapt something to a specific bootloader

mount.sh

# Clean the chroot
mount.sh -c
# Starts and mounts the
mount.sh -s
# run the mkinitcpio for the overlay
mount.sh -m

# An example to add the entry in the UEFI boot, remember to modify the path if necessary
efibootmgr --create   --disk /dev/nvme0n1   --part 1   --label "Arch Preview"   --loader '\EFI\Arch\arch-preview.efi'

Research sources:

• Overlay filesystem
• explaining-overlayfs
• Overlay Doc
• UKI
• Mkinitcpio
• And some clarifications and help from AI.