Tumbleweed Snapshots bring Kernel 5.8, Hypervisor FS Support with Xen Update

This week openSUSE Tumbleweed delivered four snapshots that brought in a new mainline kernel for the distribution as well as a package for Xen that removes previous requirements of parsing log data or writing custom hypercalls to transport the data, and custom code to read it.

The latest snapshot, 20200810, brought the 5.8.0 Linux Kernel that had a fix for missing check in vgacon scrollback handling and an additional commit from the previous version improves load balancing for SO_REUSEPORT, which can be used for both TCP and UDP sockets. The GNU Compiler Collection 10 update includes some Straight Line Speculation mitigation changes. GNOME had a few package updates in the snapshot with updates to accerciser 3.36.3, web browser epiphany 3.36.4 and GNOME games gnome-mines 3.36.1 and quadrapassel 3.36.04. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 84, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The urlscan 0.9.5 was the lone software package updated in snapshot 20200807. The version removed a workaround for fixing a python web browser bug, added an -R option to reverse URL/context output and provides clipboard support for Wayland.

Several Python related packages were updated in the stable 20200806 snapshot; these include updates to python-matplotlib 3.3.0, python-pycryptodome 3.9.8, python-python-xlib 0.27, python-pyzmq 19.0.2, python-redis 3.5.3 and python-urllib3 1.25.10. Point-to-Point Protocol communications daemon ppp 2.4.8 added new pppd options that included an IPv6 default route with a nodefaultroute6 to prevent adding an IPv6 default route. The 2.28.4 webkit2gtk3 version fixed several crashes and rendering issues as well as a half dozen Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure fixes. Hypervisor package xen had an update to the 4.14.0 version. The package corrected its license name and had some contributions from Intel, Citrix and QubesOS, which uses openQA for testing, contributed to the Linux stubdomains. The updated version offers Hypervisor FS support.

The snapshot that started off this week’s Tumbleweed review arrived in snapshot 20200805. This snapshot brought an updated version of Mozilla Firefox version 68.11.0; the updated version addressed seven CVEs, which included one fix of a leak with WebRTC’s data channel. The system daemon package sssd 2.3.1 provided new configuration options and fixed many regressions in Group Policy Object (GPO) that was introduced in the previous version. Xfce Windows manager xfwm4 4.14.4 fixed some complication warnings and the 2.23 transactional-update package added a “run” command to be able to execute a single command in a new snapshot as well as a “–drop-if-no-change” option to discard snapshots if no changes were performed. The snapshot recorded a stable rating of 99, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.