Arch Linux in January 2024 #

Staff #

We would like to welcome Vladimir LAVALLADE (Erus Iluvatar) to their new role as ArchWiki Administrator.

Infrastructure #

The DevOps team has recently provisioned a new EPYC 9454P build server for Arch Linux packaging. This high-performance server is meant to streamline the packaging process, ensuring more efficient building of resource hungry package builds.

mkinitcpio #

mkinitcpio v37.2 and v37.3 have been released. These releases include numerous bug fixes, such as patches addressing inflated initramfs sizes and resolving issues with kernel images located in non-standard locations.

RFC #

An RFC has been proposed to add -fno-omit-frame-pointer and -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer to the default compilation flags to improve the effectiveness of profiling and debugging tools.

Additionally, an RFC has been proposed to define new mirror administration routines and mirror requirements. This RFC outlines the requirements, definitions and guidelines surrounding not only becoming but also maintaining and decommissioning a mirror.

Packaging #

Firefox #

The firefox and firefox-developer-edition packages have been updated to include regular debug packages. As part of this update, symbols are no longer submitted to Mozilla at the end of the build process. Instead, Mozilla retrieves all symbols from our end. This change enables local debugging of Firefox while still allowing the submission of useful crash reports to Mozilla and leveraging their profiling service.

Statistics #

In this month, we’ve successfully rolled out 11068 package updates addressing various enhancements and rebuilds, including 2777 package upgrades. Additionally, we’ve received 204 new package issues, while resolving a total of 258 issues.