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

Support for Wifi WPA security in the default network configuration was only added after the release for 24.6.

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.