Arch Issues

mkinitcpio-bluetooth.md

Bluetooth failing on boot

If you've ever had a message like:

Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to load intel firmware file ibt-20-1-3.sfi (-2)

displayed during the boot process (particularly if you have a LUKS partition and with mkinitcpio-bluetooth configured) this might solve the problem.

When the AX200 bluetooth device would encounter a problem (typically occurring during sleep/wake or hard resets) and (presumably) would need to have it's driver reloaded, the initramfs image would be unable to load it and you'd be left having to type a password for LUKS in using the integrated keyboard.

The solution is extremely simple (and documented in the mkinitcpio-bluetooth README), make the driver files available in the initramfs:

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf or where-ever you keep mkinitcpio configuration:

# FILES
# This setting is similar to BINARIES above, however, files are added
# as-is and are not parsed in any way.  This is useful for config files.
FILES=(/usr/lib/firmware/intel/ibt-20-1-3.sfi.xz /usr/lib/firmware/intel/ibt-20-1-3.ddc.xz)
# assuming your firmware files are xz compressed

It should now be able to load or recover the bluetooth device on startup automatically.

systemd-boot-default.md

Bootloader Defaulting to Windows

If you've had the experience of your bootloader defaulting to Windows (or another undesirable OS on your multi-boot setup), even with the boot order set to Arch Linux first, with a result that looks like this:

            Arch Linux
=>      Windows Boot Sector
   Reboot Into Firmware Interface

It means that you're presumably using systemd-boot and have at some point accidentally tapped d with the OS highlighted. It's very simple to fix, just select the OS again and tap d to disable it, ? or h should bring up a small menu with more details too.

For some reason I haven't dug out yet I was unable to fix this with any amount of tinkering with bootctl and /boot/loader/loader.conf. But that's my problem!