The dnf transaction is essentially the whole cost of a build — emulated rpm
scriptlets for 502 packages on minimal, 1929 on workstation. Everything after
it is minutes. Getting this laptop to boot will take several attempts at the
kernel command line and the dracut driver list, and paying for a reinstall each
time is not tenable.
Stage the post-dnf tree under <work>/base, keyed on a hash of the package
lists, release and variant, and copy it per build with --reflink=auto (a CoW
clone on btrfs). Config and overlay edits now reuse it; package list edits
invalidate it on their own, so --fresh is only needed to force the issue.
Keep downloaded rpms in a cachedir outside the install root, so even --fresh
re-runs the scriptlets without re-downloading. keepcache=0 was exactly the
wrong setting for a build meant to be run repeatedly.
Add --work so CI can put both outside the job workspace, which is wiped between
runs, and default the build container to the gongfoo aarch64 build base so the
assembly tooling is not installed under emulation every time. That image is a
speedup, not a dependency: fall back to stock Fedora when it is unreachable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XWRjNJMistCy6ngXH5aJLS
Assembles a ready-to-write disk image via Gitea Actions. Mainline has carried
sdm850-lenovo-yoga-c630.dts since 5.5 and Fedora ships it in kernel-core, so
unlike aarch64-laptops/build there is no kernel or GRUB to compile — what is
left is producing an image that boots on firmware which hands Linux no device
tree.
The build runs in an aarch64 container under qemu-user and builds filesystems
from directory trees with mke2fs -d and mcopy rather than mounting loop
devices, so it works on runners that will not hand out /dev/loop-control.
A kernel-install hook writes the devicetree line into each BLS entry; without
it the first `dnf update kernel` would produce an unbootable system.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XWRjNJMistCy6ngXH5aJLS
