Build & flash the SD

Single-shot from a Mac on Apple Silicon. Whole thing takes ~15 min.

What you need

• A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• A microSD card (8GB+) labelled pi (the bootstrap script refuses to touch any other device)
• macOS with Multipass installed (brew install multipass if not)
• The nosferato branch of the NearTrace repo

Run

git checkout nosferato
chmod +x infra/nosferato/bootstrap/*.sh infra/nosferato/firstboot/*.sh
infra/nosferato/bootstrap/build.sh

The script:

1. Verifies /dev/disk5 is the SD with label pi. Aborts otherwise.
2. Spins up an arm64 Multipass VM (~2 min, only the first run).
3. Inside the VM: debootstrap into a loopback ext4 image.
4. Pulls Raspberry Pi firmware blobs (start.elf, fixup.dat, bcm2710-rpi-zero-2-w.dtb, kernel8.img).
5. Mac side: partition the SD (256MB FAT32 + remainder).
6. dd the rootfs image onto the SD's root partition.
7. Mount FAT, drop config + firstboot script + firmware blobs.
8. Eject.

Then

Slot the SD into the Pi, power it on. First boot takes ~30–45 min (it's where systemd → runit swap, tool install, and the nexmon build live). Don't unplug. See first boot for what to expect.