[Testing Update] 2023-10-28 – Thunderbird, Chromium, KDE-Git, Haskell – Testing Updates

There might be a regression introduced with 6.6.0-rc4 which got also backported to 6.1.59 and 6.5.8 Kernels. There is a discussion with the author of the offending patch ongoing here.

ZFS extramodules; i.e., linuxXX-zfs, have been dropped from the repos. There have been recent difficulties building them and no one on the Manjaro Team uses ZFS.

Please install zfs-dkms instead. You will to need to manually remove the old 2.1.13 extramodule package(s) first to install the new 2.2.0 packages; i.e., with linux61:

sudo pacman -R linux61-zfs && sudo pacman -Syu zfs-dkms

FS#79884 : [gnome-shell] Restarting gnome-shell using Alt+F2 and entering R, causes a crash

It is recommended to remove all third-party extensions before updating, then install the compatible versions after updating and rebooting. All Most extensions in the Manjaro repos are already updated.

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] https://github.com/besser82/libxcrypt/pull/113

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

[7] pam_unix: 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