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.
