Debian 9: what's new

On June 17, 2017, the ninth version of Debian, codenamed Stretch, was released. Work on Debian 9 lasted for a little over two years, and to be precise, 26 months. It will be maintained over the next five years.

The new version is dedicated to the memory of the founder of the Debian project, Ian Murdoch , who died in late 2015.

The release of a new version of one of the most popular Linux distributions is very important news. And in this article we would like to tell about all the innovations implemented.
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In addition, we have one more news, no less important: the Debian 9 image is already available to users of our cloud services - Vscale and Virtual Private Cloud , and you can get to know it better right now.

Supported Architectures

Debian 9 supports the following architectures: i386, amd64, armel, armhf, mips, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x. Added support for new architecture - mips64el.

As with other popular Linux distributions, PowerPC support has been discontinued. Read more about supported architectures here .

Kernel 4.9

Debian 9 uses the kernel of the latest LTS version - 4.9; in the near future, it will be replaced by the kernel of version 4.14, which is scheduled for release this fall.

APT Package Manager Update

The apt package manager in Debian 9 has been significantly improved over previous versions. Unreliable algorithms for calculating checksums are not supported: for example, SHA1 is disabled by default.

In previous versions of Debian, a hash sum mismatch sometimes occurred when synchronizing mirrors. In Stretch, it is finally fixed thanks to the use of the so-called by-hash breakdown : metadata files are loaded by the content hash.

Another interesting innovation that will undoubtedly be interesting for owners and administrators of mirrors: APT can now use the SRV record in DNS to determine the backend for downloading. Now you can manage backends using DNS, without using any additional services to process requests. This is how the new deb.debian.org mirror works .

Software updates

Debian 9 includes the latest versions of many popular development tools and system applications:

• Apache 2.4.25;
• GCC 6.3;
• Systemd 232;
• GnuPG 2.1;
• Golang 1.7;
• OpenJDK 8;
• Perl 5.24;
• PHP 7.0;
• Tomcat 8.5 &

Instead of the traditional MySQL in Debian 9, its MariaDB fork is used by default. When upgrading from a previous version of MySQL 5.5 or 5.6, it will automatically be replaced by MariaDB 10.1.
MySQL support will be saved. Read more about it here .

New approach to naming network interfaces

Instead of the traditional scheme whereby network interfaces get names like eth0, eth1, eth2, Debian 9 uses a completely different approach — stateless persistent network interface names (stateless persistent names). The naming uses indexed interface numbers in the BIOS, as well as PCI slot numbers.

The interface eth0, for example, is now called ens0, and wlan0 is wlp3s0. When upgrading from a previous version (Debian 8 Jessie), the names will not be automatically changed.

How to upgrade

To upgrade from Debian 8 Jessie to Stretch, you must first upgrade your system:

$ sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 

Next, edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add stretch repositories to it. This can be done with one command:

 $ sed -i 's/jessie/stretch/g' /etc/apt/sources.list 

Then we perform on the second circle:

 $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 

During the upgrade, the system will ask the following question: Restart services during package upgrades without asking? Select the answer Yes.

Upon completion of the update, restart the system:

 $ sudo reboot 

After reboot, run:

 $ cat /etc/debian_version 9.0 

As you can see, everything went well.

If you are a user of our cloud services, you can make everything much easier and create a virtual server running Debian 9 with one click. And if you are not with us yet, join soon and you can quickly (usually right on the day of the official release) get the latest versions of popular Linux distributions.

Conclusion

In this article, we have reviewed the innovations implemented in Debian 9 Stretch.
Try and share your impressions.