Tumbleweed Snapshots Bring Changes for KVM, QEMU, Xen

Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were once again released this past week, which included two Linux Kernel updates.

The most recent snapshot, 20180818, updated the kernel to version 4.18.0, which brought many changes for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). Mozilla Firefox 61.0.2 improved website rendering with the Retained Display List feature enabled and also fixed broken DevTools panels. The ffmpeg 4.0.2 package in the snapshot added conditional package configuration and AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) support. Netfilter project nftables was restored as the default backend with firewalld 0.6.1 and now nftables and iptables can co-exist after a bug fix with the ‘nat’ table form the 4.18 kernel. The Command Line Interface configuration utility for wireless devices known as iw added support in its 4.14 for all new kernel features of kernel 4.14. The HTTP client/server library for GNOME, libsoup 2.62.3, now uses an atomic-refcounting in classes that are not using GObject-refcounting. The Linux Kernel 4.16 or higher is needed for the strace 4.24 package, which implemented decoding of KVM vcpu (virtual central processing unit) exit reason as an option, and yast2-http-server 4.1.1 fixed PHP support by dropping php5 and using php7.

The 20180815 Tumbleweed snapshot had the last 4.17 kernel with an update from Kernel 4.17.3 to 4.17.4. The new 7.0.8.9 version of ImageMagick has the XBM coder leave the hex image data uninitialized if hex value of the pixel is negative. Several fixes were made with btrfsprogs 4.17.1 and an add ability to fix wrong ram_bytes for compressed inline files was also made with the package update in the snapshot. The advanced twin panel file manager for KDE Plasma, krusader 2.7.1, had a few fixes including a fix to the search bar in the application that showed results for a file that was deleted. The qemu 2.12.1 package dropped several patches and the updated gave new mitigation functionality for CVE-2018-3639. Caching proxy squid 4.2 provided fixes for GNU Compiler Collection 8 and a missing pointer. There were also several patches in the xen 4.11.0 update for GCC 8 and the yast2-storage-ng 4.1.4 update addressed the partitioner and now displays Xen virtual partitions and allows users to format and mount them.

Snapshot 20180815 recorded a stable rating of 93 on the snapshot reviewer and 20180818 is currently trending a moderate rating of 86.