[Testing Update] 2023-09-27 – Kernels, Thunderbird, Firefox, LibreOffice – Testing Updates

2023-09-22 – David Runge

With shadow >= 4.14.0, Arch Linux’s default password hashing algorithm changed from SHA512 to yescrypt [1].

Furthermore, the umask [2] settings are now configured in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile.

This should not require any manual intervention.

Reasons for Yescrypt

The password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme yescrypt has been chosen due to its adoption (readily available in libxcrypt, which is used by pam [3]) and its stronger resilience towards password cracking attempts over SHA512.

Although the winner of the Password Hashing Competition [4] has been argon2, this even more resilient algorithm is not yet available in libxcrypt [5][6].

Configuring yescrypt

The YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR setting in /etc/login.defs is currently without effect, until pam implements reading its value [7]. If a YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR higher (or lower) than the default (5) is needed, it can be set using the rounds option of the pam_unix [8] module (i.e. in /etc/pam.d/system-auth).

General list of changes

• yescrypt is used as default password hashing algorithm, instead of SHA512
• pam honors the chosen ENCRYPT_METHOD in /etc/login.defs and does not override the chosen method anymore
• changes in the filesystem (>= 2023.09.18) and pambase (>= 20230918) packages ensure, that umask is set centrally in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile

[1] yescrypt – scalable KDF and password hashing scheme

[2] umask(1p) — Arch manual pages

[3] PAM – ArchWiki

[4] https://www.password-hashing.net/

[5] [RFC] Add argon2 backend. by ferivoz · Pull Request #113 · besser82/libxcrypt · GitHub

[6] Add support for Argon2 by maandree · Pull Request #150 · besser82/libxcrypt · GitHub

[7] Support reading YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR from /etc/login.defs · Issue #607 · linux-pam/linux-pam · GitHub

[8] pam_unix(8) — Arch manual pages

– Arch Linux – News: Changes to default password hashing algorithm and umask settings

With the filesystem 2023.09.03-1 and bashrc-manjaro 5.1.016-3 updates there may be pacnews for the following files if you have local modifications:

• /etc/shells
• /etc/bash.bashrc

This would be a good time to test @Ste74’s new manjaro-pacnew-checker program. See Check and manage pacnew files for more info.

2023-08-19 – Robin Candau

As of ansible-core 2.15.3, upstream moved documentation and examples to a separate dedicated repository (see the related changelogs).
This means that, starting from version 2.15.3 the ansible-core package will stop shipping documentation and a default configuration example under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.

Regarding the documentation, it is available online: https://docs.ansible.com/
As for the configuration file, as explained in the wiki, a base config can be generated with the following command:

ansible-config init --disabled > ansible.cfg

After updating from ansible-core <= 2.15.2-1 to >= 2.15.3-1, everyone using a custom global Ansible configuration file stored under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg will have their configuration saved as a pacsave file.
To restore it, run the following command:

mv /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.pacsave /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

– Arch Linux – News: ansible-core >= 2.15.3-1 update may require manual intervention

There seems a performance regression of posix_memalign in Glibc-2.38. More info here: 30723 – Poor posix_memalign performance with long free lists

Workarounds:

mkdir -p ~/.config/mpv && printf 'ndemuxer-max-bytes=50MiBndemuxer-max-back-bytes=25MiBn' | tee -a ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

sudo pacman -Rdd grub-update
sudo pacman -Suu grub

[1] [2] [3]

[Unstable Update] 2023-05-21 – Repository changes – #199 by Zesko

Kernel 6.4.4, 6.4.5 and 6.1.39 LTS are affected:
The known issue and report:

Details: bug report, arch task, arch forum thread.

• Workaround #1 (causes steam to avoid making any calls to lib32-libgudev by using a different library altogether)

  • sudo pacman -S lib32-libnm

• Workaround #2 (forces steam and any other application to always use the new lib32-libgudev)

  • sudo pacman -S lib32-libudev0-shim

• Workaround #3 (use steam-native-runtime, which doesn’t have the issue)

  • sudo pacman -S steam-native-runtime

[Testing Update] 2023-06-27 – Kernels, Linux-Firmware, Mesa, Wine, Nvidia, KDE-git – #4 by xvin

– Arch Linux – News: TeX Live package reorganization

Update your system and merge the pacman pacnew /etc/pacman.conf.pacnew file.

sudo pacman -Syu "pacman>=6.0.2-11"

2023-06-14 – Felix Yan

The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn’t ship optimized LAPACK routine and CBLAS/LAPACKE interfaces for compatibility. This decision has been reverted now, and the ability to choose a different default system BLAS/LAPACK implementation while keeping openblas installed is now provided to allow future co-installation of BLIS, ATLAS, etc.
wiki post
The default BLAS implementation will be used for most packages like NumPy or R. Please install blas-openblas and blas64-openblas to make OpenBLAS the default BLAS implementation, just like the old behavior.

Unfortunately you will get errors on updating if you currently have OpenBLAS installed as the default BLAS implementation:

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by cblas
:: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by lapack

Please append your preferred default BLAS implementation to the regular -Syu command line to get around it. For example:

sudo pacman -Syu blas-openblas

or

sudo pacman -Syu blas

– Arch Linux – News: OpenBLAS >= 0.3.23-2 update requires manual intervention