[Testing Update] 2023-11-29 – Kernels, Nvidia, libxml2, Thunderbird, Deepin, Pipewire 1.0, Qemu – Testing Updates

AUR (Arch User Repository) packages are neither supported by Arch nor Manjaro. Posts about them in Announcements topics are off-topic and will be flagged, moved or removed without warning.

For help with AUR packages, please create a new topic in AUR and a helpful volunteer may be able to assist you.

If you experience similar or new issues please run sudo usr/bin/nvidia-bug-report.sh and post either in an already given post or create a new one, including your generated nvidia-bug-report.log.gz for Nvidia to fix the issue: Linux – NVIDIA Developer Forums

2023-11-02 – Frederik Schwan

We are introducing a change in JDK/JRE packages of our distro. This is triggered from the way a JRE is build in modern versions of Java (>9). We are introducing this change in Java 21.

To sum it up instead of having JDK and JRE packages coexist in the same system we will be making them conflict. The JDK variant package includes the runtime environment to execute Java applications so if one needs compilation and runtime of Java they need only the JDK package in the future. If, on the other hand, they need just runtime of Java then JRE (or jre-headless) will work.

This will (potentially) require a manual user action during upgrade:

• If you have both JDK and JRE installed you can manually install the JDK with pacman -Syu jdk-openjdk and this removes the JRE related packages.
• If you have both JRE and JRE-headless you will need to choose one of them and install it manually since they would conflict each other now.
• If you only have one of the JDK/JRE/JRE-headless pacman should resolve dependencies normally and no action is needed.

At the moment this is only valid for the upcoming JDK 21 release.

– Arch Linux – News: Incoming changes in JDK / JRE 21 packages may require manual intervention

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] [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] 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.