Mesa, Flatpak, Plasma Update in Tumbleweed

This week openSUSE Tumbleweed users learned of the performance optimizations gained with changes for x86-64-v3 and received a few snapshots.

Some of the packages to arrive this week included software for KDE users, gamers and people beginning their Linux journey.

Snapshot, 20230301 delivered a new major version of a 3D graphics library. Mesa 23.0.0 was announced by Dylan Baker, who highlighted all the community’s improvements, fixes and changes for the release. A major Link Time Optimization leak was fixed in the release and several Radeon (RADV) drivers and Zink Vulkan fixes became available with the release. AppStream 0.16.1 updated is documentation and fixed some behavior with the binding helper macros. Flatpak 1.14.3 introduced splitting an upgrade into two steps for the wrapper. It also introduces the filename in an error message if an app has an invalid syntax in its overrides or metadata. The Linux Apps Summit, which covers Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, will take place in Brno, Czech Republic, next month and is a great event to hear from developers working on cross-distro solutions in the application space. The second update of the week for sudo arrived in the snapshot. The 1.9.13p2 fixed an --enable-static-sudoers option arriving in the 20230225 snapshot. An update of apparmor 3.1.3 added support for more audit.log formats, fixed a parser bug and fixed boo#1065388, which had progressed to be resolved over a five-year period.

The 20230228 snapshot took care of a few Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, which arrived in the curl 7.88.1 update. Daniel Stenberg knocked out a video about the bug fixes in 7.88.1, but the video about the 7.88 release covers the CVEs like CVE-2023-23916, which would cause a malloc bomb and make curl end up spending enormous amounts of allocated heap memory. CVE-2023-23914 and CVE-2023-23915 were also covered in his video. The kernel-source was updated to 6.2.0, which refreshed and updated configurations like the disabling of a misdesigned mechanism that doesn’t fit well with the v2 cgroups kernel feature. The utility package to maintain groups of programs make updated to version 4.4.1, which had a backward-incompatibility warning related to visibility of a flag inside a makefile. The make release provides new features like being able to override the built-in rules with a slightly different set of rules to use parallel builds, which previously was not possible to use with archives. The text editor vim 9.0.1357 update fixed several problems including a crash when using an unset object variable and a cursor being in the wrong position with virtual text ending in a multi-byte character. The package for diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace, strace, updated to version 6.2 and implemented collision resolution for overlapping ioctl commands from tty and subsystems.

The file changes for 20230227 fixed some crashes with the mlterm package and a CVE-2022-24130 patch was added.

The 20230225 snapshot updated ImageMagick 7.1.0.62. The image editor had some security updates, eliminated compiler warnings and Block Compression 5. The update of NetworkManager 1.42.2 added a new setting to control whether to remove the local route rule that is automatically generated. The network package also fixed a race condition when setting the MAC address of an Open vSwitch interface. Updated translations arrived in the glib2 2.74.6 version along with some bug fixes, and the mariadb 10.10.3 release fixed a crash recover with InnoDB. The package also removed some InnoDB Buffer Pool load throttling and a shutdown hang when the change buffer is corrupted. A major version for the device memory enabling project arrived in the snapshot; ndctl 76 has a new command to monitor CXL events. Other packages up update in the snapshot were sudo 1.9.13p1, yast2-security 4.5.6, zstd 1.5.4 and more.

There is no doubt that snapshot 20230224 was a Plasma snapshot. All the packages to update in the snapshot were KDE related. The Plasma 5.27.1 update had its fill of bug fixes, and a few were related to packages that would come later in the week. The Discover software center had some fixes related to Flatpak and AppStream. There were a large amount of KWin changes and a couple related to Wayland. A potential crash for screen management package libkscreen was resolved with new setting configurations. Power consumption package powerdevil fixed a bug about the charging limit.

For the next two weeks, there won’t be a Tumbleweed blog providing updates on the week’s snapshots. Tumbleweed users are encouraged to subscribe to the Factory mailing list where the release manager posts an update about the rolling release and highlights a few packages that are forthcoming for the distribution.