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.