Arch Linux

kezyr

Member

Registered: 2026-09-18

Posts: 1

mkinitcpio 42 PCR7 change should have been announced in Arch News

I think the mkinitcpio 42 change that added systemd-pcrosseparator.service to the initramfs deserved an Arch Linux News / manual-intervention notice.

systemd-pcrosseparator.service extends PCRs 0-7, 9 and 12-14. For systems using TPM2-bound LUKS with direct bindings to any of these PCRs, this changes the measured state and invalidates the existing TPM enrollment.

The upgrade itself completes normally and provides no warning that the next reboot may no longer unlock the root volume automatically. Depending on the setup, this may force the user into whatever fallback recovery mechanism is configured.

The same issue is discussed here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=314912

The mkinitcpio 42 release notes mention that install/systemd now includes systemd-pcrosseparator.service, but the consequence for existing PCR-bound TPM enrollments is far from obvious.

Could the Arch maintainers consider announcing changes like this on archlinux.org and also emitting a visible warning during the package upgrade? A package update that deliberately changes measured boot state and invalidates existing TPM-bound root-volume unlocking seems significant enough to warrant an explicit warning before reboot.

killertofus

Member

Registered: 2025-02-10

Posts: 241

Re: mkinitcpio 42 PCR7 change should have been announced in Arch News

make a feature request https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … work_items

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I Have Linux Perl Can i Download Gnome???

mesaprotector

Member

Registered: 2024-03-03

Posts: 200

Re: mkinitcpio 42 PCR7 change should have been announced in Arch News

I downgraded mkinitcpio because the upgrade broke my wireless internet and I don't really have a spare hour right now to figure out why.

Many of the news posts are for niche packages that affect few people, whereas this affects ~90 percent of people using Arch. I completely agree that this should have been very well warned and I cannot imagine that none of the arch devs thought it deserved a news post.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,424

Re: mkinitcpio 42 PCR7 change should have been announced in Arch News

Given the amount of threads / posts about the issue I'd not be surprised if 90% of arch users were NOT affected by this.

On the necessity of a news item : that decision is made by the dev who does the update. If they do feel a news post is warranted they usually ask for opinions on how to word it on arch-dev-public.

If you follow that mailing list you'd know mkinitcpio got a new maintainer a few weeks ago. Maybe they didn't realise this change does warrant a news post ?

P.S.
The arch dev team has noticed the issue and are discussing a draft news post.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

nl6720

The Evil Wiki Admin

Registered: 2016-07-02

Posts: 718

Re: mkinitcpio 42 PCR7 change should have been announced in Arch News

I assumed most people just shrugged and re-enrolled the TPM PCRs, like I did.

There's a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Truste … nitcpio_42 now and a news post incoming.