STORAGE-PLAN.md

Cleanup and Linux storage expansion

Updated 2026-10-14. The 2026-10-13 layout and capacity notes below the cleanup section are historical; the current reported layout is summarized here. This is planning only: no partition, LUKS, or Btrfs changes were performed for this request.

Current reported layout

Owner-provided output describes a 931.8 GiB internal SSD:

Region	Size	Purpose
p1	500 MiB	iBoot System Container — preserve
p2	717.1 GiB	macOS APFS
Free gap	112 GiB	Before Asahi partitions; origin must be confirmed
p3	2.3 GiB	Asahi APFS boot stub — preserve
p4	500 MiB	EFI, mounted at /boot — preserve
p5	94.7 GiB	LUKS2 containing Btrfs /@elementary, mounted as / and /home
p6	5 GiB	Apple Recovery — never touch

The gap precedes the Asahi stub/EFI/Linux root unit, so p5 cannot be extended into it by growing its end. Asahi's partitioning cheatsheet says to preserve the first iBoot and last System Recovery partitions, treats the stub, EFI, and Linux root as one logical OS unit, and warns against unsorted GPT entries. The distribution guidelines say disk changes must be limited to free space left by the Asahi Installer. Therefore, do not use this gap unless its Asahi Installer provenance is confirmed; if it was created by a different tool or the origin is unknown, stop.

Safest candidate for enlarging /

If the gap passes that provenance check, the candidate is to create a separate partition wholly inside the gap, encrypt it as a new LUKS2 volume, verify that the installed initramfs can unlock it early, reboot once while the existing root is still single-device, and only then add the mapper to the existing Btrfs filesystem with btrfs device add. This increases Btrfs capacity without moving p3/p4/p5. It makes root depend on both encrypted volumes and both remaining on the same physical SSD; it adds no physical redundancy. Do not run mkfs.btrfs, balance, or profile conversion as part of the plan.

This is a checkpointed proposal, not authorization to write the GPT or format a device. Before any destructive step, require fresh sector-level output, a verified external backup and LUKS header backup, a confirmed recovery route, a reviewed exact target, and the owner's explicit confirmation. If initramfs early-unlock and Btrfs discovery cannot be proven for this installation, leave the new partition unused and do not add it to root. The repository's factory ISO is not hardware-boot-qualified and must not be treated as a verified recovery path.

See procedures/ROOT-EXPANSION.md for the read-only preflight, checkpoints, rollback boundary, and official references. The next action is to capture and review that preflight output; do not run partition operations yet.

Cleanup performed with owner authorization

• Removed Hugging Face hub/xet downloads, preserving other top-level account metadata. These models need downloading again before local use.
• Cleared pip, Playwright browser downloads, Brave cache, and downloaded APT packages. Installed applications remain; Playwright browsers may need reinstalling before browser tests.
• Saved Fairydust's missing build input as fairydust/usb4/config and the running kernel configuration as fairydust/usb4/running-config.
• Archived both extracted source trees into /home/admin/fairydust-usb4/source-trees-before-cleanup.tar.zst (452 MiB), passed zstd -t, then removed only base/src and work/linux-fairydust. Kept source archives, package files, resolution notes, and recovery copies.
• Explicitly approved snapshot cleanup: 4, 5, 6, 7 and migration copies elementary-grow-20261012-102330, elementary-grow-20261012-102435. Preserve snapshot 8, migration copy elementary-grow-20261012-102513, and every installed OS root including the active @elementary/@elementary-home.

Btrfs snapshots share extents, so their apparent 16–18 GiB sizes are not reclaimable individually. Use measured filesystem free space after deletion, not the sum of directory sizes. See LOCAL-BUILD.md for the current capacity check; do not remove older OS roots as if they were caches.

Measured result after cleanup and Btrfs deletion synchronization: 49.6 GiB free, up from 37.4 GiB. All six approved snapshot deletions completed; latest rollback copies and active roots remain. This is still 10.4 GiB below the local full-build guard. No partition or filesystem resize ran.

Old OS retired after explicit approval

The owner subsequently approved retiring @, @home, @log, @fresh, @factory, @/.snapshots (including snapshot 8), and the final elementary-grow migration snapshot. Those eight subvolumes were deleted and deletion synchronized. Only active @elementary (ID 278) and @elementary-home (ID 279) remain.

Before deletion, private local archives captured the old home/configuration and current boot files under /home/admin/Documents/storage-recovery/:

• old-omarchy-home-and-config.tar.zst (4,364,425,132 bytes).
• boot-before-old-os-retirement.tar.zst (213,071,734 bytes). Both passed zstd integrity checks. The root-owned directory is mode 0700; archives are private and are not published in this repository. Ephemeral Unix sockets were omitted by tar, as expected.

Three stale Omarchy GRUB entries were removed from the old generated 10_linux section after syntax checks. The custom elementary USB4 default, root/home mounts, and bootloader binaries were preserved. SHA-256 verification before/after confirmed the active Fairydust kernel, initramfs, m1n1 boot.bin, and known-good USB4 recovery image unchanged. No reboot/boot qualification is implied by those checks.

Free space is now 69.4 GiB, passing the 60 GiB local image-build guard. No partition resize, metadata-profile change, balance, or filesystem rebuild was performed. Btrfs metadata and its DUP protection remain required.

The old Omarchy fallback and legacy Arch rebuild chroot are retired. Legacy Fairydust scripts that mount @/@home cannot be used on this host until a new Arch build environment is prepared. Rebuild inputs, patches, installed kernel/modules, and known-good boot recovery copies remain available.

Latest capacity check — 2026-10-13

The Fairydust package's generic QEMU userspace smoke test passed under TCG. After clearing the previously approved Hugging Face and mkosi caches, and removing the completed kernel compiler-object tree, the tested kernel .deb packages, source tree, logs and configuration report were retained. Current free space is 37.7 GiB; mseries/local-build-preflight.py reports the local image build is still 22.3 GiB below the conservative 60 GiB guard. No full image build or partition operation was started. To pursue a local build, first collect fresh read-only diskutil list and diskutil apfs list output from macOS or Recovery and determine the actual shrinkable APFS space. Do not resize from the current Linux session or assume the earlier 69.4 GiB measurement still applies.