Sept. 14, 2024
With the release of version 7.0.0 pacman has added support for
downloading packages as a separate user with dropped privileges.
For users with local repos however this might imply that the download
user does not have access to the files in question, which can be fixed
by assigning the files and folder to the alpm group and ensuring the
executable bit (+x) is set on the folders in question.
$ chown :alpm -R /path/to/local/repo
Remember to merge the .pacnew files to apply the new default.
Pacman also introduced a change to improve checksum stability for
git repos that utilize .gitattributes files. This might require a
one-time checksum change for PKGBUILDs that use git sources.
After upgrading to openssh-9.8p1, the existing SSH daemon will be unable to accept new connections (see https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/openssh/-/issues/5).
When upgrading remote hosts, please make sure to restart the sshd service
using systemctl try-restart sshd right after upgrading.
We are evaluating the possibility to automatically apply a restart of the sshd service on upgrade in a future release of the openssh-9.8p1 package.
Recently we held our leader election, and the previous Project Leader Levente "anthraxx" Polyák ran again while no other people were nominated for the role.
As per our election rules he is re-elected for a new term.
The role of of the project lead within Arch Linux is connected to a few
responsibilities regarding decision making (when no consensus can be reached), handling
financial matters with SPI and overall project management tasks.
Congratulations to Levente and all the best wishes for another successful term! 🥳
The vm.max_map_count parameter will be increased from the default 65530 value to 1048576.
This change should help address performance, crash or start-up issues for a number of memory intensive applications, particularly for (but not limited to) some Windows games played through Wine/Steam Proton. Overall, end users should have a smoother experience out of the box with no expressed concerns about potential downsides in the related proposal on arch-dev-public mailing list.
This vm.max_map_count increase is introduced in the 2024.04.07-1 release of the filesystem package and will be effective right after the upgrade.
Before upgrading, in case you are already …
Update: To our knowledge the malicious code which was distributed via
the release tarball never made it into the Arch Linux provided binaries,
as the build script was configured to only inject the bad code in
Debian/Fedora based package build environments. The news item below can
therefore mostly be ignored.
We are closely monitoring the situation and will update the package and
news as neccesary.
TL;DR: Upgrade your systems and container images now!
As many of you may have already read (one), the upstream release tarballs for xz in version 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 contain malicious code which …
