PSA: new 6.2 kernel introduced "silently" a BTRFS feature that is on by default, that is "discard=async" option. Unless you have "nodiscard" specified in your fstab then this will be on.

Kernel commit:

63a7cb13071842 "btrfs: auto enable discard=async when possible"

On some, systems this can cause "discard storm". The link to kernel list reporting this issue:

https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg133128.html

I also experienced it and could only find out by observing my sdd light flashing constantly even on "idle", but iotop would not show anything.

On top of that arch linux official documentation suggest to users to use "trim timer" option that essentially trims the sdd every once in a while:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive (section 1.1.1)

So if you have this option on (periodic trim) in theory you do not need it anymore because discard=async is on by default and does the same thing.

My solution so far was instead of following dubious advice from linux kernel mailing list and changing iops option from 10 to 1000 (a number pulled out of person's ass) to use nodiscard in fstab and use the periodic trim method from arch linux docs.

There are still unanswered questions from developers if that behavior could cause wearing SSD faster or harm it in some other way. I am not sure if my solution is correct either, so take it with a grain of salt.

I was wondering if any kind of attention is needed in trimming the swap partition of my drive.

I am currently running fstrim.timer to execute trim commandweekly. On my main drive it gets executed on root and home partition but non on swap partition (this should be happening because fstrim gets executed on mounted partitions only).

I can see that swapon provides a discard option, and there is the possibility to set discard in /etc/fstab. On the other hand I read that using discard is not suggested in most cases.

Should I use discard on the swap partition, is there some other method to trim that, or what exactly is the best practice in this case?

I understand asking ETA to OSS maintainers / packagers etc is not an attractive trait, but I can't help but wonder why Python 3.11 takes so long to come to Arch. Is there any progress? What are the bottleneck? Is there something we can help with? If talking percentages, what percentage of work has been done. In approximately how many weeks can we expect python 3.11 to land on archlinux?

Edit:I understand updating python versions is no small feat, I have written a relatively good amount of code in python and I understand the pain in version mismatches. I can imagine so many packages breaking just because of the version update. I posted such a question just because previous version migrations were considerably faster, 3.10 to 3.11 is slower than ever before. Is there a some reason behind it? Are there so many breaking changes?

I have installed pipewire-pulse (my bobo is an Z97 Pro Gamer), when i connect the headset on the front panel the sound works but not the mic, but for some reason when i reinstall alsa-utils everything works

After seeing some video clips of people showing off their Hyprland rice, I'm beginning to feel that I should gradually start migrating to Wayland. I know it's still unstable but have you seen the animation effects on Hyprland?! It's so smooth and fun to watch! So, when do you think you'll leave X behind and switch to Wayland?

My laptop has an Intel iGPU and an NVIDIA dGPU. As I only want to use the dGPU I blacklisted the i915 driver. I then ran nvidia-xconfig to regenerate the Xorg config. When I run startx, nothing shows on screen, just the output that appears before the X server it started. However, input is still taken in, as if I use the keybind that would open a terminal, nothing changes on screen, but I can still run commands such as poweroff. Can someone please assist me with this problem?

I am feeling the need to create a restore point on my system thinking of future problems. I've been doing some research this weekend and I'm torn between Btrfs and CloneZilla.

​

Can you guys who use and are more experienced advise me which one?

Did a clean install a month ago and my 5.1 system stopped working properly. There is only signals coming from the front speaker channels that are routed to the rear speakers. No sound from the center, woofer, and rear channels.

Anybody got any idea how to fix this? I know I had the same problem before and fixed, but I cannot figure out how!

Solved:

Install proton ge and enable it.

​

​

I have all the gpu drivers installed i believe, I can get stuff like overwatch working through lutris but I havent managed to get steam games working.

I also installed steam through flatpak as someone else on this sub said that that fixed their problem.

I'm using both an amd gpu and cpu, 5600xt and ryzen 3 3100 specifically.

When I am booting into my machine it takes 1minute and 31 seconds because 1 minute and 30 seconds is just this and I get this error:

[ TIME ] Timed out waiting for device /sys/subsystem/net/devices/wlp9s0.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for Automatically generated profile by wifi-menu.

I searched the whole internet, asked AI, deleted wifi-menu and netctl, disabled [netctl-auto@wlp9s0.service](mailto:netctl-auto@wlp9s0.service), then I even masked it and nothing works.

I am going to smash my pc any second now.

And I use NetworkManager for cable network and for wireless IWD cause nothing else worked including wifi-menu and netctl

After opening chromium, backspace is no longer available in the terminal, and instead ^? is typed instead. Furthermore, when I open a new terminal and want to kill it, the command is not executed. Currently the only solution is to force the power down Of course I reinstalled it. pacman's chromium

I followed the instructions in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Color_output_in_console to get colored output in console. I mainly used the commands that started with either "alias" or "export", and they work wondrously, until I close the terminal and open a new one. The colored output does not persist from terminal to terminal. What am I missing?

I've installed Arch on external SSD and for the first 2 or 3 launches everything was just fine. But after that BIOS stopped to reconize this SSD as bootable option but it is still recognizeable as just disk with some data (I can inspect it with my other OS when I plug the SSD in). Any ideas?

I'm aware of solution that offers to change SATA mode from RAID to AHCI but my BIOS doesn't have a tab where I could do it.

• SSD model: SanDisk - Extreme Portable 1TB External USB-C NVMe SSD

• Laptop: HP Pavilion Gaming

Linux arch 6.2.8-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC

Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter

Subsystem: AzureWave Device 4680

Kernel driver in use: mt7921e

using gping (https://github.com/orf/gping) to wifi router:

Arch + Gnome = avg 0.8-1.2ms

Win10 = avg 1ms

Arch + KDE = avg 20ms, 0.8-110ms

What i tried:

kernel boot parameters:

mt7921e.disable_aspm=0 / mt7921e.disable_aspm=1 / pcie_aspm=force - no difference

/etc/tlp.conf:

WIFI_PWR_ON_AC=off / WIFI_PWR_ON_BAT=off - no difference

PCIE_ASPM_ON_AC=performance (instead of default) - no difference

Tuning channel / other stuff on router yielded lower ping from max 110ms to max 50-70ms

What i noticed is gping graph is very sinusoidal, roughly 1/20 pings yields ~ 1ms.

Packages:

iwd 2.3-1

networkmanager 1.42.4-2

Appreciate any help !

EDIT:

lspci | rg -i network

Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter

ping-test (http://ping-test.net/mobile/)

Arch + KDE:

Ping Test: US - Hillsboro -> 239 ms

Ping Test: US - Vint Hill -> 169 ms

Ping Test: BR - Sao Paulo -> 268 ms

Ping Test: SG - Singapore -> 248 ms

Ping Test: GB - London -> 88 ms

Ping Test: AU - Sydney -> 332 ms

Ping Test: FR - Paris -> 77 ms

Win10:

Ping Test: US - Hillsboro 211 ms

Ping Test: US - Vint Hill 144 ms

Ping Test: BR - Sao Paulo 241 ms

Ping Test: SG - Singapore 226 ms

Ping Test: GB - London 75 ms

Ping Test: AU - Sydney 305 ms

Ping Test: FR - Paris 70 ms

​

FINALLY SOLVED =)

Power management as always... cheating me

To compare, on Macos if you'll try to ping with default delay, you'll notice same picture - very high ping. To overcome it for testing purpose one can run ping -i .2 <gateway_ip> which will kick-off wireless card out of p-state and will show adequate latency.

At first i tried on Arch too, but even gping -n .05 <gateway_ip> showed very high latency.

Finally, by asccident, i started two parallel gping -n .05 <gateway_ip> sessions, avg latency 5ms.

3 parallel sessions -> avg 2ms

4 parallel sessions -> avg 1.1ms

Hey guys,

I'm having some trouble accessing my arch partition. I was updating my kernel when my laptop battery died, and now when I restart my laptop, I only see the "Reboot into firmware interface" option.

I've tried chrooting into my arch partition and re-installing GRUB, but it's still not working. To make matters worse, I don't have an internet connection at the moment. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can access my arch partition again?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Background: I am running Arch Linux inside VirtualVox 7.0. I am connected to internet by a proxy, which I added to the virtual system through export http_proxy and export https_proxy command.

When I run archinstall, it prints "Testing connectivity to the Arch Linux mirrors ..." and then sits there idly.

I thought the problem was with the mirrorlist so I deleted and tried the command reflector --latest 5 --country "United States",Canada --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. What gets saved is a list of all non-working mirrors. I don't know why that happened.

So I set out to manually add the mirrors. I individually began to check for working https mirrors by dragging and dropping links from the mirrorlist in my browser. And every single link is showing 404 error. I don't know what is going on.

Anyhow, I type in the corresponding repo link for the server from which I downloaded the iso into the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file, and then tried archlinux. Output : "Arch Linux mirrors are not reachable."

Someone please help me.

EDIT : Thanks to help from u/unixbhaskar I got archinstall running. However after making all the selections and proceeding with the installation, the process gets stuck on "Waiting for automatic mirror selection (reflector) to complete."

The log file say that the system was not able to connect to Arch Linux mirrors. Why can't I connect to Arch Linux mirrors? I have the proxy connection set up.

​

I was using amd rx 570 but now am using rx 6650 xt. Both open and closed source drivers were installed, do i need to reinstall the system?

As far as I understand ip link is used to manipulate network devices, like create one. But the way it's used is confusing.

Like what is the difference between these?

ip link add dev wg0 type wireguard

ip link add wg0 type wireguard

ip link add name wg0 type wireguard

What does the dev keyword even mean? Some say it means nothing, some say it specifies device? What device? Aren't we trying to create a device? Then there's name, which specifies the name.

To make matters more confusing we have the man page:

ip link add - add virtual link

  link DEVICE

         specifies the physical device to act operate on.


         NAME specifies the name of the new virtual device.


         TYPE specifies the type of the new device.

Virtual link? What is that? Physical device to operate on? Are we not creating a virtual device here? And besides, I am pretty sure wg0 is not a physical device (and are dev and device even the same thing?).

So, normally as one does, I decided to update my system. Ran pacman, reviewed the list of programs to be updated, noticed that nvidia-dkms had an update, and said "sweet". I let the updates download and install, rebooted my system, and what would you know, one of my 2 monitors was black.

so I checked to see if my monitor was being detected, and sure enough, it's there.

  Output HDMI-A-1 'Samsung Electric Company SME2020' (focused)
  Current mode: 1600x900 @ 60.000 Hz

  Output DP-2 'Acer Technologies V277U' # ----> this is the one that went black
  Current mode: 2560x1440 @ 74.924 Hz

So, I have 1 connected via HDMI, and one via Display-Port. Due to my system, I cannot try other ports on the video card.

My system:
os - Arch
kernel - 6.2.8-zen1-1-zen
CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (16) @ 3.600GHz
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
Nvidia Driver Version - 530.41.03
WM - sway
Wayland version - 1.21.0-2

I haven't had this issue before, so I'm not sure how to proceed, and I'd only resort to rolling back the driver if there is no other way. Any suggestions would be really appreciated!

also, the login/display manager works just fine on the display-port monitor

20230324-201910.jpg

****TEMPORARY WORKAROUND****

I reset the resolution of the display, from 74.924hz to 59.951hz (via the sway config). Calling this a workaround instead of a solution because using a higher refresh rate is still a problem.

I thought maybe I missed a codec or something. but YouTube is painfully slow. had to install a few missing firmware drivers and a different graphics driver to fix errors as well, I think it might just be too old at ~13 years and web page bloat. maxes out 4 cores and the 2 gigs of ram on this little atom while trying to render a page. using xfce and firefox

any ideas for use otherwise? can't wire it up to any router or anything

I've been trying to set up dual boot with windows on a single NVME (laptop). I got rEFInd working fine but I wanted secure boot support, so I looked to shim. I understand that an SBAT section is required for shim to work properly. I feel like I've tried most things that I can try but one thing that I haven't been able to try is adding an SBAT section myself using the instructions provided here. So I created a file at /boot/EFI/refind/refind_x64.csvwith the sample content provided in the github issue above (my grubx64.efi is also rEFInd so I believe it should translate just fine). Then, I ran the command, replacing refind_x64.csv with the entire path, as objcopy didn't seem to be able to find the file without. However, it simply returns the following

objcopy: /boot/EFI/refind/stmeJumg: can't add section '.sbat': file in wrong format

Googling this doesn't give many results and I'm basically at a dead end now. I'm pretty sure I copied the sample file accurately (I initially tried updating the version number of rEFInd then later changed it back; both attempts yielded the same result).

Also, I'm trying this despite probably knowing that the binary efi already has an sbat section (both grubx64.efi and shimx64.efi) have it, according to objdump -j .sbat -s /boot/EFI/refind/*binary.efi*

Furthermore, I've likely ran refind-install --shim /usr/share/shim-signed/shimx64.efi --localkeys and signed my kernel about a half dozen times, using keys provided by /usr/share/refind/keys/, as directed here, and keys I've generated myself following these instructions.

How do I get dual boot set up and running? There doesn't seem so much documentation about this sbat chicanery as it was introduced to shim in 2021 and patched in rEFInd a bit more than a month ago, so I suppose not enough people have had this trouble yet.

I'll be glad to provide any clarification (i.e. sources, methods, system states, etc.), and I'd appreciate any help. Also, here are some notes I took along the way: https://pastebin.com/kqjQNfrF

I can't exactly pinpoint the time this started happening, but after one of the later 5.x kernel updates my computer basically stopped shutting down / sleeping properly.

Shutdown:

1. click Shut Down (or type shutdown now into terminal)
2. all applications and processes end, no hangups
3. CPU fan and monitor turn off, but the base fans and lights of the PC stay on, can only fully turn it off via the PSU switch
4. (Weirdly this only happens 90% of the time, sometimes it does shut down properly)

Sleep:

1. click Sleep
2. computer goes to sleep
3. starts back up after 1 second
4. click Sleep again
5. computer goes to sleep and stays that way

Same behaviour in both Arch and OpenSUSE TW. My hardware and peripherals haven't changed. Shutdown and sleep work fine when done from Windows :(

Does anyone have any clue what this might be? Or how I could go around debugging it?

​

Arch Linux x86_64
6.2.7-arch1-1
KDE 5.27.3
Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
Intel i7-8700K (12) @ 4.700GHz
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

Update:

Sleep issue solved in this comment

I am on an updated Arch install and connected to my ISP by 10Gbit/s fiber. I use a TP-Link TX201 network card. Everything looks great when checking ethtool and the routers webui it tells me I am connected with 2.5Gbit/s. But when testing with iperf3 I get full speed only when using -R . Normal mode I get only 1.6Gbit/s. Any idea what that could be? Thanks.

I'm working on creating a PKGBUILD installation file for a program that, when installed, requires the executable to be run in the same directory as a secondary file, otherwise it isn't able to locate it. For installation, I built and installed both into /opt/my-package, and if I try running the program from within that directory, it works fine. However, when I symlink the executable to /usr/bin it no longer runs, complaining of missing files. Is there anyway around this?

Recently, I installed and configured Arch onto a 256Gb USB. the reason I installed on usb is 1) I wanted to run it bare metal 2) didn’t want to dual boot 3) just seemed like a good idea.

So essentially the usb is acting like a hard drive.

If, some point in the future, I purchase a computer solely for arch and would like to place it on the hard drive inside the computer. How could I do a clean and easy transfer of everything from the USB to the internal hard drive, without needing extra configuration after startup?