2021-01-18

Upcoming glibc upgrade requires updates for other packages on 32-bit machines

Note: This only applies to users of Void’s glibc version on 32-bit machines. If the command xbps-uhelper arch prints something other than i686, armv7l or armv6l, like armv6l-musl, you don’t need to do anything.

Void Linux currently packages glibc version 2.30, but is going to update to 2.32 soon, together with the long awaited GCC 10. Since this new version makes use of new system calls, due to the ongoing time64 (support for times after 2038 on 32-bit platforms) work on glibc, applications with restrictive seccomp filters that haven’t been rebuilt for the new glibc version will stop working. Packages with such issues include:

• openssh
• firefox
• chromium
• qt5-webengine (and consequently dependants, such as qutebrowser)
• electron* (and consequently dependants, such as element-desktop)

We will be pushing updates to these packages before the glibc update, if possible, but it won’t be possible for all of them. This includes openssh, which means you can be locked out of your system if that’s what you use to access it and you perform a partial upgrade that only includes the glibc package.

Therefore, even though Void enables partial upgrades, you should perform a full system upgrade when glibc appears in the xbps-install -Su list. Be sure to test these packages - for openssh this includes actually opening a session, since sshd itself runs without issue. If for some reason something in your system stops working, you can of course reinstall the old glibc package using xdowngrade(1) from the xtools package:

# xdowngrade /var/cache/xbps/glibc-2.30_2.x86_64.xbps /var/cache/xbps/glibc-locales-2.30_2.x86_64.xbps

If we missed some package with this issue, please let us know! You can open an issue on GitHub or ping us in the #voidlinux channel on https://freenode.net.