A patched version of pacman is now in [testing] that will detect all the issues reported so far that resulted in failed updates. Users of the [testing] repo who last updated in the three days between the kmod update and the glibc update may still run into issues, but "pacman -Sy pacman && pacman -Su" will prevent that. Here is a (very draft) news item. I think it provides complete update instructions for people using the "stable" repos. Removal of /lib directory All files in the /lib directory have been moved to /usr/lib and now /lib is a symlink to usr/lib. During this update, pacman will identify a conflict in the /lib directory. In the simplest case, this is worked around by doing pacman -Syu --ignore glibc pacman -Su When additional package depend on having a newer version of glibc than is currently on your system and these also have files in /lib (e.g. older versions of gcc), then and extra step will be necessary. For example: pacman -Syu --ignore glibc gcc pacman -Sd gcc pacman -Su Only do the -Sd step if really necessary. Pacman will warn you about a conflict in /lib on the -Su step if it is. If the "pacman -Su" step reports a conflict in /lib, you will need to look at all the files in /lib and determine which ones are not owned by glibc. This is achieved by "pacman -Qo /lib/*". You will need to move any files not belong to glibc to /usr/lib (either through fixing their package or manually moving unowned files). There should be no subdirectories in /lib either. Finally, NEVER use pacman --force (-f) for the glibc update. That will result in a broken system.