Arch Linux - News
The latest and greatest news from the Arch Linux distribution.
Around two years ago, we've merged the [community] repository into [extra] as part of the git migration. In order to not break user setups, we kept these repositories around in an unused and empty state. We're going to clean up these old repositories on 2025-03-01. On systems where /etc/pacman.conf still references the old [community] repository, pacman -Sy will return an error on trying to sync repository metadata. The following deprecated repositories will be removed: [community], [community-testing], [testing], [testing-debug], [staging], [staging-debug]. Please make sure to remove all use of the aforementioned repositories from your /etc/pacman.conf (for which a .pacnew was shipped with pacman>=6.0.2-7)!
We plan to move glibc and its friends to stable later today, Feb 3. After installing the update, the Discord client will show a red warning that the installation is corrupt. This issue has been fixed in the Discord canary build. If you rely on audio connectivity, please use the canary build, login via browser or the flatpak version until the fix hits the stable Discord release. There have been no reports that (written) chat connectivity is affected. UPDATE: The issue has been fixed in Discord 0.0.84-1.
We'd like to raise awareness about the rsync security release version 3.4.0-1 as described in our advisory ASA-202501-1. An attacker only requires anonymous read access to a vulnerable rsync server, such as a public mirror, to execute arbitrary code on the machine the server is running on. Additionally, attackers can take control of an affected server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client. Sensitive data can be extracted, such as OpenPGP and SSH keys, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.popt. We highly advise anyone who runs an rsync daemon or client prior to version 3.4.0-1 to upgrade and reboot their systems immediately. As Arch Linux mirrors are mostly synchronized using rsync, we highly advise any mirror administrator to act immediately, even though the hosted package files themselves are cryptographically signed. All infrastructure servers and mirrors maintained by Arch Linux have already been updated.
Arch Linux hasn't had a license for any package sources (such as PKGBUILD files) in the past, which is potentially problematic. Providing a license will preempt that uncertainty. In RFC 40 we agreed to change all package sources to be licensed under the very liberal 0BSD license. This change will not limit what you can do with package sources. Check out the RFC for more on the rationale and prior discussion. Before we make this change, we will provide contributors with a way to voice any objections they might have. Starting on 2024-11-19, over the course of a week, contributors will receive a single notification email listing all their contributions. If you receive an email and agree to this change, there is no action required from your side. If you do not agree, please reply to the email and we'll find a solution together. If you contributed to Arch Linux packages before but didn't receive an email, please contact us at package-sources-licensing@archlinux.org.
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). 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 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).
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 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 from our mirrors. We strongly advise against using affected release artifacts and instead downloading what is currently available as latest version! Upgrading the system It is strongly advised to do a full system upgrade right away if your system currently has xz version 5.6.0-1 or 5.6.1-1 installed: pacman -Syu Upgrading container images To figure out if you are using an affected container image, use either podman image history archlinux/archlinux or docker image history archlinux/archlinux depending on whether you use podman or docker. Any Arch Linux container image older than 2024-03-29 and younger than 2024-02-24 is affected. Run either podman image pull archlinux/archlinux or docker image pull archlinux/archlinux to upgrade affected container images to the most recent version. Afterwards make sure to rebuild any container images based on the affected versions and also inspect any running containers! Regarding sshd authentication bypass/code execution From the upstream report (one): openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma. Arch does not directly link openssh to liblzma, and thus this attack vector is not possible. You can confirm this by issuing the following command: ldd "$(command -v sshd)" However, out of an abundance of caution, we advise users to remove the malicious code from their system by upgrading either way. This is because other yet-to-be discovered methods to exploit the backdoor could exist.
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 38-3 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.
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.
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