First of all, we will mount the BTRFS partition.

discard and ssd mount options are optimizations for SSD drives. discard is to activate `Discard/TRIM'' optimizations and `ssd is for specific BTRFS optimization on SSD drives.

Then we can create the subvolumes in the BTRFS partition.

We can now mount the subvolumes in the right order.

We create the directories in this new-mounted subvolume and mount the other subvolumes.

However, the /var/lib is the directory in which some interesting files are installed and we want to keep them in the __active/ROOT subvolume to make easier the snapshot procedure. Remember, we create a directory in this subvolume. So we will bind it.

At this point, we should mount the EFI partition as the /boot directory.

You will now root from the newly installed base system with a arch-chroot. The configuration begins with mainly the same operations that we have done before.

We will configure a default profile for a wireless connection with SSID mySSID and a WPA security. Then we will make this connection automatic with wpa_actiond. Begin to install wpa_actiond with the base package netctl. The dialog package allow us the use of wifi-menu to generate netctl profiles.

Then create a netctl profile from an example file. You can either automatically generate a profile file with wifi-menu or use the manual configuration below.

You should modify /etc/netctl/profile to make it look like the following.

Do not forget to change the path to the wpa_supplicant.conf file which should be /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

Now, we can configure the WPA configuration of our mySSID wifi network. To configure this network, we use wpa_passphrase. We first backup the default configuration file.

Do not forget the double quotes, especially if the SSID contains spaces. You may edit the file and remove the password which appear in clear.

You can now enable this service.

To generate the initial ramdisk, because you run with BTRFS partitions, you should modify some hooks in the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. We will add a hook for btrfs. For this new hook, we must install the package btrfs-progs.

Secondly, BTRFS does not have a robust check file system so if we have the fsck hook, it will display an error. We have 2 solutions:

I choose gummiboot bootloader which is a simple bootloader for EFI systems. First of all, you install it. Before installing it, you may mount the efivarfs.

Now, we can configure the bootloader following the specifications propose by http://www.freedesktop.org (see the references). Before configuring it, we will get the following variable:

Create an entry in /boot/loader/entries.

We may also configure the main configuration file /boot/loader/loader.conf.

The default should be fine since it use any entry file which begin with the machine ID.

You should now create the directories and copy the images into them.

You may have the following messages during the creation of the ramdisk.

It is probably some missing firmware you may install later.

When installing gummiboot with pacman, you may have the following error message.

If this is the case, you may try the following before trying to reinstall gummiboot.

You may crash into the ramfs when rebooting. This is probably because you forget to indicate to the kernel which BTRFS subvolume is the default one. You may choose one of the two following solutions (both are explained in the above configuration):

You should have something like the following

We will now set the default subvolume which will be used by the kernel to launch the system. Keep the ID of the __active/ROOT subvolume and use it in the following command.

Be aware that this solution will fail to mount the root BTRFS system since it will mount instead this default subvolume. You may avoid it in the previous configuration because the root BTRFS file system must be mount in order to bind /var/lib.