Subject: [arch-announce] linux-firmware >= 20250613.12fe085f-5 upgrade requires manual intervention

From: "Arch Linux: Recent news updates: Jan Alexander Steffens" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2025 23:09:08 -0000

With `20250613.12fe085f-5`, we split our firmware into several vendor-focused packages. `linux-firmware` is now an empty package depending on our default set of firmware.

Unfortunately, this coincided with upstream reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from `20250508.788aadc8-2` or earlier, you will see the following errors:

    linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem
    linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem
    linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem
    linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem

To progress with the system upgrade, first remove `linux-firmware`, then reinstall it as part of the upgrade:

    # pacman -Rdd linux-firmware
    # pacman -Syu linux-firmware

URL: https://archlinux.org/news/linux-firmware-2025061312fe085f-5-upgrade-requires-manual-intervention/