by George Whittaker

Arch Linux has shipped its November 2025 ISO snapshot (2025.11.01), and while Arch remains a rolling distribution, these monthly images are a big deal, especially for new installs, labs, and homelab deployments. This time, the ISO lands alongside two important pieces:

• Archinstall 3.0.12 – a more polished, smarter TUI installer

• Pacman 7.1 – a package manager update with stricter security and better tooling

If you’ve been thinking about spinning up a fresh Arch box, or you’re curious what changed under the hood, this release is a very nice jumping-on point.

Why Arch Still Ships Monthly ISOs in a Rolling World

Arch is famous for its “install once, update forever” model. Technically, you could install from a two-year-old image and just run:

sudo pacman -Syu

…but in practice, that’s painful:

• Huge initial update downloads

• Possible breakage jumping across many months of changes

• Outdated installer tooling

That’s why the project publishes a monthly snapshot ISO: it rolls all current packages into a fresh image so you:

• Start with a current kernel and userland

• Spend less time updating right after install

• Get the latest Archinstall baked in (or just a pacman -Sy archinstall away)

The 2025.11.01 ISO is exactly that: Arch as of early November 2025, ready to go.

What’s Inside the November 2025 ISO (2025.11.01)

The November snapshot doesn’t introduce new features by itself, it’s a frozen image of current Arch, but a few details are worth calling out:

• Ships with a Linux 6.17.x kernel, including improved AMD/Intel GPU support and updated Btrfs bits.

• Includes all the usual base packages plus current toolchains, drivers, and desktop stacks from the rolling repos.

• The image is intended only for new installs; existing Arch systems should keep using pacman -Syu for upgrades.

You can download it from the official Arch Linux download page or via BitTorrent mirrors.

One small twist: the ISO itself still ships with Archinstall 3.0.11, but 3.0.12 was released the same day – so we’ll grab the newer version from the repos before running the installer.

Archinstall 3.0.12: What’s Actually New?

Archinstall has evolved from “nice experiment” to “pretty solid way to install Arch” if you don’t want to script everything yourself. Version 3.0.12 is a refinement release focused on stability, storage, and bootloader logic.

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Hello community, here we have another set of package updates. Welcome to our new development cycle of Manjaro 25.1.0, code-named ‘Anh-Linh’.We will focus on Plasma 6.5 series and will introduce GNOME 49, maybe Cosmic 1.0 (Beta).

Current Promotions

• Get the latest Gaming Laptop by Slimbook powered by Manjaro: Slimbook Manjaro III
• Protect your personal data, keep yourself safe with Surfshark VPN: See current promotion

Recent News

• Manjaro 25.0 Zetar released
• Manjaro Summit public Alpha now available
• As of Linux 6.16.12, the 6.16 series is now EOL (End Of Life). Please install 6.17 stable and/or 6.12 LTS (Long Term Support).

Valkey to replace Redis in the [extra] Repository (click for more details) Previous News Finding information easier about Manjaro (click for more details) Notable Package Updates

• Kernels got updated
  • linux618 6.18-rc5
• Systemd 258
• Mkinitcpio 40
• KDE Gear 25.08.3
• Plasma 6.5.2
• COSMIC Beta 5

Additional Info Python 3.13 info (click for more details) Info about AUR packages (click for more details)

Get our latest daily developer images now from Github: Plasma, GNOME, XFCE. You can get the latest stable releases of Manjaro from CDN77.

Our current supported kernels

• linux54 5.4.301
• linux510 5.10.246
• linux515 5.15.196
• linux61 6.1.158
• linux66 6.6.116
• linux612 6.12.57
• linux617 6.17.7
• linux618 6.18.0-rc5
• linux61-rt 6.1.156_rt56
• linux66-rt 6.6.116_rt66
• linux612-rt 6.12.49_rt13
• linux616-rt 6.16.0_rt3
• linux617-rt 6.17.5_rt7

Package Changes (11/10/25 08:39 CET)

• testing core x86_64: 26 new and 26 removed package(s)
• testing extra x86_64: 897 new and 919 removed package(s)
• testing multilib x86_64: 15 new and 15 removed package(s)

A list of all changes can be found here.

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by George Whittaker

AMD has officially confirmed a high-severity security vulnerability in its new Zen 5–based CPUs, and it’s a nasty one because it hits cryptography right at the source: the hardware random number generator.

Here’s a clear breakdown of what’s going on, how bad it really is, and what you should do if you’re running Zen 5.

What AMD Just Confirmed

AMD’s security bulletin AMD-SB-7055, now tracked as CVE-2025-62626, describes a bug in the RDSEED instruction on Zen 5 processors. Under certain conditions, the CPU can:

• Return the value 0 from RDSEED far more often than true randomness would allow

• Still signal “success” (carry flag CF=1), so software thinks it got a good random value

The issue affects the 16-bit and 32-bit forms of RDSEED on Zen 5; the 64-bit form is not affected.

Because RDSEED is used to feed cryptographically secure random number generators (CSPRNGs), a broken RDSEED can poison keys, tokens, and other security-critical values.

AMD classifies the impact as:

Loss of confidentiality and integrity (High severity).

How the Vulnerability Works (In Plain English) What RDSEED Is Supposed to Do

Modern CPUs expose hardware instructions like RDRAND and RDSEED:

• RDRAND: Gives you pseudo-random values from a DRBG that’s already been seeded.

• RDSEED: Gives you raw entropy samples suitable for seeding cryptographic PRNGs (it should be very close to truly random).

Software like TLS libraries, key generators, HSM emulators, and OS RNGs may rely directly or indirectly on RDSEED to bootstrap secure randomness.

What’s Going Wrong on Zen 5

On affected Zen 5 CPUs:

• The 16-bit and 32-bit RDSEED variants sometimes return 0 much more often than a true random source should.

• Even worse, they simultaneously report success (CF=1), so software assumes the value is fine rather than retrying.

In cryptographic terms, this means:

• Entropy can be dramatically reduced (many key bits become predictable or even fixed).

• Keys or nonces derived from those values can become partially or fully guessable.

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