GCC, EFI Boot Manager Update in Tumbleweed

Rolling-release distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed had a large number of security patches, bug fixes, and new features in snapshots released this week.

Users who did a zypper dup had a full distribution rebuild with GNU Compiler Collection 13, which is the distro’s new default compiler.

This rebuild 20230319 snapshot provided a GCC 13.0.1+git update that rebased a patch and enables a mutual exclusion (mutex) link. An update of flatpak 1.14.4 updated translations and eliminated two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; CVE-2023-28101 and CVE-2023-28100, which was specific to virtual consoles and users were recommended to use a graphical user interface like GNOME Software rather than graphical terminal emulator such as xterm , gnome-terminal or Konsole. The C++ library for Single Instruction, Multiple Data highway 1.0.4 provides faster KV128 sorting. The package also updated RISC-V Vector Extension Intrinsics for the 1.0-draft. Other packages to update was libstorage-ng 4.5.86 along with several libqt5 packages.

The 20230318 snapshot updated just two packages. The fcitx5-gtk package updated to version 5.0.22. This gtk-im-module and glib-based dbus client library implements notify-focus-out signal and changes GtkIMContext.reset to always commit the preedit state. The other package to update was a Library for creating MusicBrainz DiscIDs, which is a fantastic open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. The libdiscid 0.6.4 package fixes compiler errors and requires CMake 2.8.12 as a minimum version.

Snapshot 20230317 updates DNS protocol bind 9.18.13. The update provides several new features like increasing the responsiveness of named Response Policy Zone (RPZ) updates that are applied after an RPZ zone is successfully transferred. KDE enthusiasts can be happy with the bug fixes released in the Plasma 5.27.3 update. A few of the highlighted fixes were the addition of emoji picker to mappings, the remove of duplicate items when loading from history and PowerDevil sought to make some changes in order to not waste precious energy. An update of gtk4 4.10.1 brought a plethora of changes. Besides dropping a patch that was fixed upstream, the new version fixed a memory leak, some scrolling problems and improved search performance for the cross-platform widget toolkit. An update of systemd to version 253.1 added a few patches, which one is a [temporary workaround until LVM boot failure is fixed in dracut. Several other packages were update in the snapshot including pipewire 0.3.67, icewm 3.3.2, and many qt6 packages.

The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Boot Manager had a major version update in snapshot 20230316, but it wasn’t the only one. There were two other major versions in the snapshot. The efibootmgr 18 restored an activation error message and fixed help messages. The package also added an option for insertion location of new entries and fixed the simple run example. Another major version update was for EFE variables in the efivar 38 update. This package fiedx parsing for nvme-subsystem devices, added some new tooling and properly checks mmap return errors. And yet there was one more major version update with the free BitTorrent client transmission updating for version 4.0.2. The new version takes care of some potential crashes and fixes the display of IPv6 tracker URLs. The Web client was rewritten and now supports mobile use. The Linux Kernel was the only update in the snapshot that wasn’t a major version update. The 6.2.6 kernel-source update partial reverted some wifi configurations and removed some Realtek wireless drivers.