Tumbleweed Gets New OpenSSH Major Version

Since the last update, there have been five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released.

Snapshot 20191027, brought an update to KDE Plasma 5.17.1. The bugfix update fixed the Mouse KCM acceleration profile on X11 on the Plasma Desktop and had a fix for KWIN with visibility of the Context Help button. Part of the update to Plasma 5.17.1 came in the 20191022 snapshot on the day of the release from the KDE Project. The kcalendarcore package was update to KDE Frameworks 5.63.0, which landed in last week’s snapshots. Quite a few YaST packages arrived in the snapshot as well; some of the those YaST packages adapted to new Keyboard handling. The other two packages updated in the snapshot were to the AV1 decoder dav1d  0.5.1, which fixed a build issue in ARM64 assembly if debug info was enabled, and desktop calculator, qalculate 3.5.0, which had a fix for steradian conversion that is related to the surface area of a sphere.  The Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer is being fixed and doesn’t have a rating for the snapshot.

Seven packages arrived in the 20191025 snapshot and the openssh 8.1 was a major upgrade. The new major version added some new features like an experimental lightweight signature and verification ability. According to the changelog, “signatures may be made using regular ssh keys held on disk or stored in a ssh-agent and verified against an authorized_keys-like list of allowed keys. Signatures embed a namespace that prevents confusion and attacks between different usage domains (e.g. files vs email).” The VirtualBox hypervisor for x86 virtualization had a minor update to version 6.0.14; the maintenance release fixed potential issue in the networking with interrupt signalling for network adapters in UEFI guests. The Network Time Protocol package chrony 3.5 added support for hardware timestamping on interfaces with read-only timestamping configuration and Persistent Memory programming package pmdk 1.7 introduced two new Application Program Interface (APIs) in librpmem and libpmemobj.

An update to the Mesa 3D Graphical Library arrived in snapshot 20191024. The 19.2.1 version of the Mesa and Mesa-drivers package brought in several new features and a big RADV performance boost for AMD GPUs. The Linux Kernel was updated to version 5.3.7 and had several fixes for the release of a USB device. Other packages updated worth noting in the snapshot were libX11 1.6.9, libglvnd 1.2.0 and distributed filesystem openafs 1.8.5.

Both snapshot 20191023 and 20191022 were the last two snapshots to record a rating on the Tumbleweed reviewer until it’s fixed. Respectively, the two had pending ratings of  85 and 70. Just a few packages were in the 20191023 snapshot and nodejs12 12.13.0 was one of the more notable packages to update; the new  nodejs12 version addressed eight Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), which included addressing a “Ping Flood” CVE where an attacker sends continual pings to an HTTP/2 peer, causing the peer to build an internal queue of responses. Besides delivering an update to Plasma 5.17.1 on the day of the release in snapshot 20191022, the snapshot also brought libvirt 5.8.0 and an update for the control management tool mercurial 5.1.2.