Unstable Stream updates: 5th of December 2025
Changes
This Unstable Stream update took a bit longer than usual to come together, and brings several interesting changes and updates highlighted below.
What do you mean by "Unstable Stream"?
We are preparing to land a change related to our Versioned Repositories, phase 1 (https://github.com/AerynOS/infra/pull/142) PR.
This change will in the near future enable to users to 'moss sync -u' against either fixed-in-time "tags" or against regularly updated "streams".
Once this change has been landed, most users will 'moss sync -u' against the Unstable Stream, while packagers will 'moss sync -u' and boulder build against the Volatile Stream in their default build profile.
We are introducing the new concept now so our users can begin to get used to the new terminology before we land the changes.
STATUS: The Versioned Repository, phase 1 features have NOT been landed yet. No user action is required at this time.
Highlights
UEFI Firmware build changes
We now build aarch64 UEFI firmware so it is now possible to boot emulated UEFI aarch64 VMs after installing the qemu-system-aarch64 package. As part of this we now build the x64_86 firmware as an ELF format executable rather than a PE/COFF format executable (which is the "official" format used by the UEFI specification). Qemu fully supports using UEFI firmware in ELF format so this is not expected to cause any changes.
i386 UEFI firmware is no longer built. It is unlikely that anyone was actually using it.
binfmt support has been enabled in our qemu user-space packages. It is now possible to install qemu-user-aarch64 or qemu-user-arm in order to launch aarch64 or arm binaries directly without any further changes. Note: such binaries will need to be statically compiled as we do not provide an aarch64/arm user-space.
Minimum supported kernel version update
AerynOS user-space now requires at least kernel 6.1, up from a previous requirement of kernel 5.15.
This should only affect users using our 'boulder' build tool on other distributions or otherwise running AerynOS containers.
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