24.5 Changes
The release contains a total of 5140 changesets, including
approximately 5314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or
features added and 163 removed. Around 53 improvements.
Official ISOs are now automatically run through a CI testsuite
before release. The newly started testsuite project tests various
program binaries and whether the architectural ISOs fully boot.
User visible
- GCC 13
- LLVM/Clang 18
- GlibC 2.39
- Musl 1.2.5
- uClibc 1.0.47
- Linux 6.8.7
- X.Org 21.1.12
- GNOME 46.1
- KDE 24.02/6.1
- switched to pipewire by default
- enabled zram swap by default
- fixed many older Xorg and FB drivers
- improved installer for many non-x86 architectures
- improved LVM & RAID installer
- build time estimates
- better dependency resolution
- included more USB, Ethernet and PHYs in initrd
- more lightweight netinstall w/o curl
- better nfsroot support
- x32 builds now run enable 4GB HIGHMEM for more than 800MB usable RAM
- i686 builds now run on AMD Geode LX, Transmeta Crusoe and VIA C3
- ps3fb was reworked to free 8MB of RAM and reduce background CPU load by up to 6%
- added and improved homebrew support for other BSD and macOS
- latest linux kernels now booted via unversioned symlink
- unified compressed Linux kernel vmlinuz* names for all architectures
- mksh is the new default for /bin/sh and initrd
- source package builds now default to no-LTO and "smartly" optimizations to speed up builds on slower systems
- most of KDE and GNOME actually finally works again
- a ~30MB on average memory leak was fixed in the initrd
- over 200 new packages (now over 5000)
- most existing packages received an update
- over 5100 SVN revisions since the 23.6 release
Developer visible
- cached dependencies are now automatically marked optional by pkginstalled
- rustc is more often bootstrapped using the host system rustc
- libglvnd is installed by default
- libxcrypt now provides vintage crypto on glibc based builds
- icu4c was hotfixed for cross builds with different endianness
- reworked git checkouts for hopefully finally stable checksums
- better ninja support
- many more - may the source and manual be with you!
Known Issues
Due to the nature of all cross compiled base install ISOs, gobject-introspection
is not installed by default and some packages need to be natively, locally rebuilt> for some advanced gnome-desktop
packages.