Os

Updated Debian 11: 11.11 released

The Debian project is pleased to announce the eleventh and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

Updated Debian 12: 12.7 released

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 12 (codename bookworm). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

The sshd service needs to be restarted after upgrading to openssh-9.8p1

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.

Arch Linux 2024 Leader Election Results

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.

Increasing the default vm.max_map_count value

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.

The xz package has been backdoored

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!