Arch Linux

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 …

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 …