Arch Linux

Some thoughts on why I started livestreaming my open-source development sessions and my future plans.

The past year I have been hacking around on tools utilizing TPMs, and one of the features I have been interested to learn more about is the device attestation features. After being a bit inspired by some ideas from people at work, the hackerspace and toots on mastodon, I figure out a SSH certificate authority would be a cool small project to hack on. Last year I wrote an SSH agent with TPM bound keys so this would nicely fit into the existing tooling.

In the previous article I investigated how to create a reproducible image but ended up with only managing to create two identical image directories. In this article we'll end up with a fully bit-by-bit reproducible filesystem image! Some things have changed since the last post, mkosi now no longer creates …

A while ago I saw a post on LinkedIn that piqued my interest, not because it was any good, but because it was impressively wrong. It claimed that, to quote, “if every email user deleted just 10 emails, it would save enough electricity to power millions of households each year”. This is not only wrong, it is obviously wrong. In this post, I’d like to dive into why it’s wrong, how one might come to think it’s right, and perhaps what better message you could put out there to save the planet.

I've blogged before about creating vagrant images using mkosi as part of an investigation to move image creation to mkosi but also as I will be giving a talk at All Systems Go about Arch Linux images mkosi and reproducibility. With reproducible images in this article I mean that anyone …

Last FOSDEM, there where some talks around mkosi using it for kernel hacking and systemd integration tests. These talks got me interested in mkosi, a systemd project for building OS images. After chatting some more with the maintainers, I considered the idea of moving the arch-boxes project to mkosi. (note …

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.

Rationale Emacs users try to avoid leaving their editor for other tasks. There is an shell (Eshell: The Emacs Shell), an integration into Secret Service API (Emacs auth-source Library 0.3) and countless other integrations. Search is a central element of the Gnome desktop environment. Many applications implement the Search Provider dbus interface to provide suitable results. The aim of this package is to make these search results also available within the Emacs editor.

I went on a trip to Mongolia to find out the meaning behind my name.

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! 🥳

Let's delve into the realm of open source funding along with Ratatui's journey.

The vm.max_map_count paramater 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 setting your own value for that parameter in a sysctl.d configuration file, either remove it (to switch to the new default value) or make sure your configuration file will be read with a higher priority than the /usr/lib/sysctl.d/10-arch.conf file (to supersede the new default value).

Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the Reproducible Builds definition?2 When is a build reproducible? A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.

Please see the Arch main page announcement and take appropriate action. https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-packa … ackdoored/

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 adds a backdoor. This vulnerability is tracked in the Arch Linux security tracker (two). The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor. The following release artifacts contain the compromised xz:

• installation medium 2024.03.01
• virtual machine images 20240301.218094 and 20240315.221711
• container images created between and including 2024-02-24 and 2024-03-28

The affected release artifacts have been removed …

Please join me in extending our profound "Thank you"s to 2ManyDogs who has hung up their ban hammer and now joins other former moderators in the infamous Fellows Taco Lounge. In addition, it is my extreme pleasure to welcome Schard as our newest moderation team member.

We hope y'all had a good start in the new year of 2024 — With the new year usually come new resolutions. If you don't have any so far, we have one for you: What if you decided to give Arch a bit of help with testing package updates this year? Arch uses testing repositories as a buffer for core/critical package updates (or any other package updates that would benefit from being tested first) before entering the stable repositories. Testing these package updates helps us to catch more bugs upfront and ensures flawless updates for the stable repos, and that is where you can help! By joining the official Arch Linux Testing Team, you'll get the ability to "sign off" packages in testing after vouching for their correctness (or reporting a bug otherwise). This helps Arch Package Maintainers catching eventual bugs upfront and helps to move packages out of the testing repositories faster and more efficiently. We are not necessarilly looking for in depth testing. Verifiying that a program launches correctly and that you're able to perform your usual routine with it is already a good test on its own. You can also check the general testing guidelines. This is a very effective and rather easy way to contribute to Arch Linux. The more testers we have, the more reliable packages updates will be. We hope to see some of you there, also join us on IRC on Libera in #archlinux-testing!

With the release of mkinitcpio v38, several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have been moved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt, sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev. To ensure no breakage of users' setup occurs, temporary conflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packages that are no longer compatible. The following packages needs to be upgraded together:

• mkinitcpio 38-2
• systemd 255.4-2
• lvm2 2.03.23-3
• mdadm 4.3-2
• cryptsetup 2.7.0-3

Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode, and the microcode option in the preset files, has been deprecated in favour of a new microcode hook. This also allows you to drop the microcode initrd lines from your boot configuration as they are now packed together with the main initramfs image.

Sharing my experience after giving a talk at FOSDEM 2024!

Problem statement As part of dabbling with self-hosting again, I installed CasaOS on an Oracle Cloud free Ampere instance to try it out. After setting it aside for a few weeks, when I logged in via SSH and tried to use sudo I realized I absolutely couldn’t remember my user’s password 😅 The standard operating procedure in this case is to either reboot the machine on a live system and use that to chroot into the local install, or fiddle with GRUB rescue/kernel command line.1 But since I could still install containers through CasaOS web interface, I thought I’d …

Arch Linux in January 2024 # Staff # We would like to welcome Vladimir LAVALLADE (Erus Iluvatar) to their new role as ArchWiki Administrator. Infrastructure # The DevOps team has recently provisioned a new EPYC 9454P build server for Arch Linux packaging. This high-performance server is meant to streamline the packaging process, ensuring more efficient building of resource hungry package builds. mkinitcpio # mkinitcpio v37.2 and v37.3 have been released.

As someone who has to use a laptop for work, I keep my laptop plugged in 8 hours or more a day, 7 days a week. The laptop's battery during these days would discharge and charge, slowly degrading the battery because only the last ~ 20% would be charged and discharged …

I recently realized stdout is much faster than stderr for Rust. Here are my findings after diving deep into this rabbit hole.

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd. For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default. For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25.

Chromecast is one of those devices I just generally use a lot. They are small practical and enables me to stream video or music to my TV from multiple devices. But it also requires you to have a supported browser or video player. This is obviously a bit boring. There has been multiple command line chromecast streamers through the years. But their ffmpeg usage has been shoddy at best with no hardware decoding support and usually quite bad implementations.