If you got errors when updating this morning, you need this manual intervention to uninstall the existing firmware package to pave way for the new one. And we also got Linux Kernel 6.15.3 finally, as I’ve been running it on my Debian systems for a couple days with Xanmod.
https://archlinux.org/news/linux-firmware-2025061312fe085f-5-upgrade-requires-manual-intervention/
linux-firmware >= 20250613.12fe085f-5 upgrade requires manual intervention
2025-06-21 – Jan Alexander Steffens
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