Kernel Updates in Tumbleweed, Development Seeks Volunteers

Snapshot updates of openSUSE Tumbleweed were frequent and consistent this week while another development project seeks to get things moving.

A post to developers on the Factory mailing list titled openSUSE ALP: Call for Volunteers aims to gain contributors for rebuilding an openSUSE Leap 15 successor based on a forthcoming commercially available ALP distribution being pioneered by SUSE.

While the call for volunteer post has gained interest and still needs more, Tumbleweed released Linux Kernel 6.3 in snapshot. 20230503. The update from kernel-source 6.2.12 to 6.3.1 went through a considerable amount of testing before finally being released in the snapshot. A Btrfs change for the kernel fixed an uninitialized variable warning and a patch for a regression in the 6.3 version was added to the update. There was an update to enable armv7hl and arm64 configurations. The 9.3 version of libvirt was released in the snapshot. Improvements made to the release include better validation of watchdog devices related to qemu, and arm and RISC-V architectures now use the virt machine types by default. There were also several bug fixes; one was related to UEFI firmware and another related to NVMe drivers concerning locked memory. Just a few documentations improvements and updated translations were made in the spellcheck library gspell 1.12.1. The update of gtk3 3.24.37+70 was made to fix a crash. A Common Vulnerability and Exposure was fixed with the vim 9.0.1504 text editor update. CVE-2023-2426, which used an out-of-range pointer offset with the GitHub repository, won’t bug users anymore.A few other packages to update in the snapshot included GNOME’s amtk 5.6.1, gucharmap 15.0.4 and more.

The team of audacity contributors was very active this week as the second version of the week was released in snapshot 20230502. Audacity 3.3.1 fixed a calculation error when trying to upload to audio.com. The audio editor fixed crash reporting being disabled and fixed custom sample rates from being uneditable. Xfce users will be happy to feel less CPU usage thanks to a reversion that prevents this in thunar 4.18.6. The file manager also improved error handling of undo and redo. Community package serd, which is a lightweight C library for working with RDF data, updated to version 0.30.16 and addressed memory consumption when reading documentation as well as fixes spelling mistakes for manpages. An update of yast2-trans provided updates for Portuguese and Swedish languages. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot include docbook-xsl 1.79.2.1, libsoup 3.4.2, guestfs-tools 1.50.1, libupnp 1.14.17 and more.

The lightweight C library for loading and wrapping LV2 plugin User Interfaces was the only package to update in snapshot 20230501. The suil 0.10.18 version had some fixes for MacOS, but fixed issues with newer toolchains and removed Qt 4 support and some of its dead code.

Snapshot 20230430 was large, but updated a few libraries. The Wayland 1.22.0 update added explicit events for the preferred buffer scale. The display server included a few new convenience functions and bug fixes. The 3d graphical package Mesa had changes in several areas of the 23.0.3 version. There was an overlay fix that was unable to launch titles on Steam and a crash for a slicer was fixed for GNOME. Some incorrect settings were also fixed for RADV and yast2-country 4.6.2 did some configuration modules cleanup related to the keymap for Russia.

Another audio package, JACK, arrived in snapshot. 20230429. JACK 1.9.22 dropped dependencies used for the example client and fixed the build with Python 3.11+. The libzypp 17.31.11 package fixd an endless loop if the wrong credentials are stored and the package introduces a timeout in the configuration. The Perl modules package for various bootloaders eloquently perl-Bootloader reached its first major version. It updated from version 0.941 to 1.0 and removed the legacy parts. The spec file was moved to git repository and changes were made to distinguish between 32 bit and 64 bit UEFI platforms. Other packages to update in the snapshot were libxmlb 0.3.11, makedumpfile 1.7.3, postfix 3.8.0 and xdpyinfo 1.3.4.

Packages to update from last Friday’s snapshot, 20230428, were audacity 3.3.0, which now supports ffmpeg 6, and ModemManager 1.20.6, which adds additional support for 5G modems and fixed the unsolicited message with LTE. An update of gnome-shell 44.1 fixed several aspects of the package. This includes fixing placeholder alignment in the bluetooth menu, accessible names in the VPN menu and various improvements to the light theme variant. Another GNOME package to update was its window manager mutter 44.1. The update fixed some resizing windows via keyboard, an anchor position when dragging a window and the package also fixed a plugged leak. Several other packages update in the snapshot.