arch linux · unofficial configuration · v0.9.7

Kane's ArchThe Silent Architect

An aggressively minimal Arch Linux system. Software rendering, no swap, no compositor, no desktop environment. Built to answer one question: how much of a modern computer is actually necessary?

Download Kane's Arch Configuration reference

tty1 — kanes-arch — 80×24

kane@arch $

THE SILENT ARCHITECT

Closer to the machine.

No compositor. No swap. No layer that has not been argued for.

scroll to continue · esc to skip

01 — PHILOSOPHY

A modern computer spends most of its time managing itself.

Compositors redraw windows that nobody is looking at. Swap files exist to page out memory that shouldn't have been allocated. Six abstraction layers sit between a keystroke and the character that appears on screen. None of it is wrong, exactly — it just accumulated. Kane's Arch is an attempt to remove layers rather than add them, and to find out where the system genuinely stops working.

Macro photograph of an empty CPU socket, contact pins visible under raking light.

select a component

CPU-centric

Work happens on the processor

There is no GPU acceleration anywhere in the display path. Rendering, scaling and compositing all run on the CPU, where the cost of each operation is measurable and the behaviour does not change with a driver update. The trade is real: video playback above 1080p is poor, and that has been accepted rather than worked around.

lspci | grep -i vga

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel UHD Graphics (rev 0c)
        Kernel driver in use: i915  — modesetting only, no accel

Macro photograph of copper traces fanning out across a circuit board.

select a component

Software-defined display

Display without a stack

A software framebuffer replaces the conventional graphics pipeline. There is no compositor and no display server beyond what dwm requires, which means fewer drivers, fewer failure modes, and a display path short enough to read end to end in an afternoon. Screen tearing is visible during fast motion. This is a known consequence, not a bug.

ls /sys/class/graphics

fb0  fbcon
# single framebuffer device, no compositor process running

Macro photograph of memory slot contacts on a motherboard.

select a component

Zero swap

Memory is a hard limit

No swap partition and no zram. When the system runs out of memory the OOM killer fires immediately and the failure is visible in the journal within a second, rather than the machine degrading quietly for twenty minutes while it pages to disk. On a workstation with sufficient RAM this is a straightforward improvement. On a machine with 8GB or less it is not recommended.

free -h

               total        used        free      shared
Mem:            15Gi       112Mi        15Gi       0.0Ki
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

03 — SYSTEM

Running state.

Sampled from a reference machine. These figures move because the sampler is live, not because they are decorative.

CPU

MEMORY

0 MB

L2 CACHE HIT

PROCESSES

$ cat /proc/registers — snapshot

rax 0x00007ffd1a4c0e80   rbx 0x0000000000000000
rcx 0x00005584c2f10a40   rdx 0x00007ffd1a4c0e98
rsi 0x00007ffd1a4c0e88   rdi 0x0000000000000001
rbp 0x00007ffd1a4c0f10   rsp 0x00007ffd1a4c0e60
r12 0x00005584c2f0d2c0   r13 0x00007ffd1a4c0f90
rip 0x00005584c2f0e1f4   efl 0x0000000000000246

$ ps -eo pid,rss,comm --sort=-rss | head

  PID   RSS COMMAND
    1  9284 systemd
  412  6120 dwm
  418  3044 st
  219  2880 systemd-journald
  244  1932 systemd-udevd
  431  1408 bash
  447   996 htop
     —  no compositor, no display manager

Read the configuration.

Every deviation from stock Arch, with the reasoning and the trade-offs it costs. Or jump straight to what is known to be broken.

Download Configuration reference