Polkit auth broken after update (Pidfd not supported on kernel 5.15)

[plinkr]

Greetings everyone, happy 2026.

I have a problem following an update from a few minutes ago (the previous one was about 12 hours ago). polkit was upgraded:
[2026-01-05T12:43:03-0500] [ALPM] upgraded polkit (126-2 -> 127-3)

After restarting the laptop, authentication using polkit is not working, and it’s constantly spamming the logs with this message:

ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro systemd[1]: Starting Authorization Manager Agent Helper (PID 1680/UID 1000)...
ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro systemd[1]: polkit-agent-helper@13324-26155-1680-1000.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro systemd[1]: polkit-agent-helper@13324-26155-1680-1000.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro systemd[1]: Failed to start Authorization Manager Agent Helper (PID 1680/UID 1000).
ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro polkit-agent-helper-1[95452]: Pidfd not supported on this platform, disable polkit-agent-helper.socket and use setuid helper
ene 05 13:12:53 erazer-manjaro polkit-agent-helper-1[95452]: polkit-agent-helper-1: pidfd not supported on this platform, disable polkit-agent-helper.socket and use setuid helper.

Checking the status:
sudo systemctl status polkit-agent-helper.socket

● polkit-agent-helper.socket - Authorization Manager Agent Helper
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/polkit-agent-helper.socket; static)
     Active: active (listening) since Mon 2026-01-05 12:54:19 CST; 21min ago
 Invocation: c1e04e2ec0664a71bef14cf28804e556
   Triggers: ● polkit-agent-helper@11799-22096-1680-1000.service
             ● polkit-agent-helper@10358-1387-1680-1000.service
             ... (repeated about 10k times)

My kernel is:
Linux erazer-manjaro 5.15.197-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Dec 7 07:32:39 UTC 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I assume it doesn’t support Pidfd, but I cannot upgrade to a newer kernel version because on this laptop any higher version breaks suspend (not always, but occasionally). I discussed this issue here in the forum a few years back.

I see that I could try setting the SUID bit on the binary manually:

lsd -l /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1
.rwxr-xr-x root root 18 KB Sun Dec 28 07:12:35 2025  /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1

However, I want to know if there is another alternative/workaround that doesn’t involve me manually touching system files.

Cheers and thanks.

[Teo]

Look at the stable update topic, it is discussed there - either manual permission fix or reinstall of the package.

[Stable Update] 2026-01-04 - Manjaro 26.0, Mesa, Firefox, LibreOffice, COSMIC

In the latter stages of updating (pacman -Syu) I noticed a warning of incorrect permissions under the /usr/lib/polkit-1 heirarchy. Subsequently pamac update --aur failed to initialise. On the chance that this wasn’t a local issue; assigning the correct permissions will allow pamac to continue as expected: The correct permissions should be: drwxr-xr-x (755) - root:root - Directory -rwxr-xr-x (755) - root:root - Executables -rw-r--r-- (644) - root:root - Rules files Fix polkit-1 directory …

[plinkr]

In my case, just fixing the polkit-agent-helper SUID permissions wasn’t enough. I did it with:

sudo chmod 4755 /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1

But I also had to mask the polkit-agent-helper socket:

sudo systemctl stop polkit-agent-helper.socket
sudo systemctl mask polkit-agent-helper.socket

Otherwise, the problem persists.

Cheers and thanks a lot.

[Keith.A]

plinkr,

Happy New Year to you. You have just helped me fix my problem also. I am running 5.15 and couldn’t mount my additional disks because of this problem, nor use PAMAC. But using your method here including masking the polkit-agent-helper socket resolved my issue as well.

Thanks.