As linux-lts moved to the 5.10 version, all official kernels of Arch Linux now support zstd compressed
initramfs images, so mkinitcpio is switching to zstd compressed images by default with version 30,
which is currently on [testing].
If, for any reason, you are using a kernel version prior to 5.9, make sure to change mkinitcpio.conf
COMPRESSION to use one of the compressors supported, like gzip, otherwise you will not be able to
boot images generated by mkinitcpio.
glibc 2.33 introduced a CPU ISA level guessing at compile and runtime.
We are at the moment disabling this completely, as it fails in guessing
too high ISA levels and resulting in:
/usr/lib/libc.6: CPU ISA level is lower than required.
Also libseccomp support has been disabled for now, notably in
the OpenSSH sandbox (uses the rlimit one for now) and in
file/libmagic till the libcsecomp rules are adapted. The effects
were:
* unable to login via SSH
* EBADSYS errors when executing file
Google has announced that they are going to block everything but Chrome from accessing certain Google features (like Chrome sync) starting on March 15. This decision by Google is going to affect Arch's chromium
package a bit earlier, on March 2, when Chromium 89 gets released.
We know for sure that data syncing will stop working (passwords, bookmarks, etc.). Other features such as geolocation or enhanced spell check might continue to function for a bit longer. Extensions integrating with Google Drive might misbehave and LibreOffice will lose access to documents stored there.
Other distros such as openSUSE and Fedora have already removed the soon-to-be-limited API keys from their Chromium 88 packages. Fedora's advisory provides a great deal of perspective on this and I also found this Hackaday post to be quite informative.
The php package has been updated to version 8.0. Please refer to
the upstream migration guide. As some applications are not
compatible with PHP 8 yet we provide a php7 package which can be
installed alongside version 8. Packages that depend on PHP reflect
this update and will require php7 if needed. You might need to update
your configuration accordingly. PHP 7 binaries and configuration have
the "7" suffix:
- /usr/bin/php -> /usr/bin/php7
- /etc/php -> /etc/php7
- /usr/bin/php-fpm -> /usr/bin/php-fpm7
- /usr/lib/systemd/system/php-fpm.service -> /usr/lib/systemd/system/php-fpm7.service
- /run/php-fpm -> /run/php-fpm7
We also provide third party modules compiled for PHP 7:
Note that support for php7 will be limited and likely be dropped in
about a year depending on how soon the majority of applications
will be compatible with version 8.