gpg won't import any keys if they have been created "in the future" so if you try to boot archiso on a system that has never been synced (new board), the clock will most likely be off by a few years and pacman-key during boot will (silently) fail to import the master keys. Later pacman (during pacstrap) will tell you that importing any key failed (still without giving you any good clue) and only when you run `pacman-key -r <some id>` it will tell you that the key has been created in the future and tells you to fix your clock. I propose the following changes: - Let pacman-key display errors instead of redirecting everything to /dev/null: `pacman-key --populate archlinux |& grep -v -e "<some regex that matches non-interesting message>" -e "..."` - change inittab so that agetty doesn't clean the first tty so users can see any errors output by pacman-key or others - check the system time against /usr/share/pacman/keyrings/archlinux.gpg and either warn the user or run `ntpd -qg` to sync the clock I haven't yet looked at the code/git/mailinglist so if any of those have already been brought up, fixed or rejected, sorry for the noise. -- Florian Pritz