openSUSE Tumbleweed Rolls into December

November provided a robust month of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, which included 21 releases from Nov. 1 to Nov. 29.

December, which is traditionally a slower month for Tumbleweed releases due to the holiday season, has already produced a snapshot. Snapshot 20211201 gave a major update of the Linux user-space application for modifying Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Boot Manager. The efibootmgr package updated from version 14 to 17; the changes included fixes for GNU Compiler Collection 7, better parsing and now efibootmgr uses EFIDIR / efibootmgr.efidir like fwupdate had. Scrolling issues when pressing Home and Page Down keys were fixed with the webkit2gtk3 2.34.2 update. Four patches for bash were added in the 5.1.12 version, which fixes a couple trapped signals. The 2.34.1 git version fixed an issue that arose from the 20211125 snapshot; git grep that have a non-UTF8 payload were broke when linked with certain versions of pcre2’s latest release. Other packages to update in the month’s first snapshot were glslang 11.7.1, graphviz 2.49.3, libstorage-ng 4.4.61, mtools 4.0.36 and yast2-update 4.4.5.

Snapshot 20211129 provided an update of the 5.15.5 Linux Kernel, which had some arm fixes for Broadcom’s StrataGX communications processor. Tumbleweed started the month off with the 5.14 kernel. An update of iso-codes 4.8.0 added flag emojis to countries and a new translation for Chinese. LibreOffice also had some translations with the 7.2.3.2 update. Image viewer ristretto 0.12.1 fixed pointer behavior in fullscreen mode as well as a fix for a memory leak when closing the window directly. Other packages to update in the snapshot were Microsoft’s theorem prover z3 4.8.13, libsoup 3.0.3, libsoup2 2.74.2, libwpe 1.12.0 and more.

Updates for both ruby2.7 2.7.5 and ruby3.0 3.0.3 were made in snapshot 20211128. The new Ruby versions fixed the same three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; the CVE-2021-41817 security fix could have allowed an attacker to exploit the vulnerability to cause an effective Denial-of-service attack. CVE-2021-41819 and CVE-2021-41816 were the other two vulnerabilities that were fixed in the Ruby updates. The openvpn package updated to version 2.5.4 and had improvements for documentation and man page building. The package also fixed a minor memory leak under certain conditions related to adding routes to the system. A few YaST packages were updated in the snapshot like autoyast2 4.4.23, yast2-installation 4.4.23 and yast2-bootloader 4.4.9, which fixed a crash due to a missing requirement.

Two packages were updated in snapshot 20211127. The fingerprint reader package fprintd 1.94.1 fixed the systemd unit so that udev hotplug events are processed. The fingerprint package also changed PolicyKit strings and had plenty of updated translations thanks to Fedora Weblate contributions. Linux Bluetooth configuration tool blueberry 1.4.5 also had some updated translations and added a turn bluetooth on/off option.

Internet browser Mozilla Firefox 94.0.2 had a Linux specific fix in snapshot 20211126; the fix resolved general instability and crashes caused by a file descriptor leak when moving tabs to the background using WebGL. The update of ImageMagick 7.1.0.16 added support for reading extra channels in a Photoshop Document file. The graphics editing package also fixed an OpenCL build problem. GNU Privacy Guard gpg2 was updated to version 2.3.3 and fixed the Let’s Encrypt certificate chain validation. The update also provided a new configuration file common.conf, which is now used to enable the use of the key database daemon with use-keyboxd; using this option in gpg.conf and gpgsm.conf is supported for a transitional period. An update of virtualbox 6.1.30 fixed a bug on X11 involving drag and drop initiated on a single mouse click in VM storage settings; the package also began to introduce initial support for kernel 5.16. Other packages to update in the snapshot were xapps 2.2.5. newer versions of ncurses and ceph, and Catalan translations were made in the libstorage-ng 4.4.58 update.

Only one package was update in snapshot 20211125. The Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions library is a set of C functions that implement regular expression pattern matching using the same syntax and semantics as Perl 5. The pcre2 10.39 version fixed some incorrect detection involving its just-in-time (JIT) compiler and made an update of Unicode 14.0.0 support. Changes in this snapshot recevied fixes in snapshot 20211201.