In April of 2020 I was preparing to reinstall Arch Linux and I ran into a dilemma I have never seen on the Arch Wiki. The Systemd-Boot page was marked as “out of date”. They made mentions to the syntax of the install changing and I could not find any more information online, at least a guide or something showing the new syntax. I start posting around in different forums trying to find an answer and a wiki maintainer came along made some small changes and marked it as current.

I sent him an email asking why he had marked it active when no one really knew about this new syntax. But at that point I was ready. I had figured out the syntax mostly from man pages and one particular page off of systemd’s own website. After going back and forth with him for a while and he was able to recreate using the steps I had wrote and I was ready to make my first contribution to the Arch Wiki!

Below are my own personal notes of how to do the install. I still keep an eye on the systemd-boot page to see if there is ever clarification needed and that it is actually still correct.

**Using XBOOTLDR:**

create a separate partition of at least 250Mib labeled "Linux extended boot" (guid of bc13c2ff-59e6-4262-a352-b275fd6f7172) now referred to as $BOOT

Format $BOOT to fat32:
mkfs.vfat -F 32 $BOOT

mount the ESP to /mnt/efi and the $BOOT to /mnt/boot

install with pacstrap per usual

in chroot use the command: (not sure it is needed as bootctl looks for this by default but good to specify)

bootctl --esp-path=/efi --boot-path=/boot install

edit /efi/loader/loader.conf to say:

"default arch
timeout 3"

edit /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf to:

"title Arch_Linux_extendedboot
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
initrd /initramfs-linux-fallback.img
options root=/dev/sdX"

reboot and enjoy