Releases of Debian 10 Buster and Linux 5.2 have taken place.

At the end of last week, two important releases for the community took place: the anniversary version of Debian 10, which, following the tradition, was named “Buster”, as well as the new version of Linux 5.2, was released.



So, the new Debian distribution can boast an increment of more than 13,370 packages in its system (their total number is now 57,000). At the same time, 7278 packages were removed from the system (13% of the total volume of the previous version). All of them are not subject to upgrade and received the mark "obsolete".
')
The new version of Linux has brought us a new firmware Open Sound, mount API, updated GPU drivers for ARM Mali devices and support for case-insensitive names for the ext4 file system.

With full patch-nouty can be found on the links:

Debian 10 buster
Linux 5.2

And about the most basic details - under the cut.

What's new in Debian 10 Buster

In our blog, we have already come into contact with the Debian distribution by translating the blog recording of one of the leading GO developers of the project team , in which the latter revealed the main problems of development. But no matter how Michael Stapelberg was not dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in the Debian developer community, the distribution kit continues to evolve, and the new Debuan 10 Buster update brought us a lot of important things.

Below is a complete comparative table of updates for Debian 10 Buster regarding Debian 9 Stretch (clickable):



First of all, it is worth noting that the netfilter firewall management system has been changed from Iptables to Nftables . At the same time, for those who wish, the possibility of using iptables-legacy using iptables-legacy preserved. Compared to Iptables , the Nftables system has much higher performance. In addition, it updated the syntax, improved support for IPv4 / IPv6 dual-stack firewalls, has a Netlink interface for working with third-party applications, and implemented faster packet classification based on an expanded universal set of infrastructure cards. All the differences Nftables can be read here .

The standard setting of the Gnome environment has also changed. Now, by default, a session based on the Wayland protocol is involved in this process, but the developers have also retained X11-based session support for those who want it.

Also, since its introduction in 2013 in Debian 7, for the first time for new Debian installations, the access control system for AppArmor applications has been enabled by default. True, out of the box, this system works with an extremely limited number of applications, but the user can always upload additional profiles by installing the apparmor-profiles-extra package. The latter is recommended for implementation by the Debian developers themselves. AppArmor may be quite an old tool, but it allows you to distinguish between application access in terms of resources and privileges ( mount, ptrace, signal permissions, read, write, execute access ), which twenty years after the release of the first version in 1998 is extremely important. So the recommendations of the Debian team are not worth ignoring.

What's new in Linux 5.2

Upgrading the kernel is always important, especially if it is a Linux kernel. In the new version of Linux 5.2, the developers themselves are focusing on improved support for audio devices using Sound Open Firmware. But in the latest update there are other important things.

So, we have highlighted the new mount api. Many users may not notice the difference, but this update is important from the infrastructure side of the issue. Apparently, the development team took up cleaning the garbage and rewriting the mounts responsible for mounting file systems. The existing interface of Mount is similar to the old layer cake: this system has evolved over the years, overgrown with new functions and tasks, so that at some point it turned into something too complicated. In order to make life easier for users and eliminate the need to use crutches like Shiftfs , six new system calls were added: fsopen (2), fsconfig (2), fsmount (2), move_mount (2), fspick (2) open_tree (2) . How to properly use the new challenges can be found here .

The next important update is a set of drivers for ARM Mali devices. One of the oldest threads on the w3bsit3-dns.com forum for installing Linux on a device with a graphic core ARM Mali dates back to 2013, and inside there are quite a few dances with a tambourine. Then even the partial work of the video chip under Linux was considered luck.

Much of the blame for the perennial suffering of users lies on the ARM company itself, which is not very willing to cooperate with the Open Source-community, but the Linux developers went their own way and wrote the drivers themselves. The new package supports older t4xx devices, as well as newer 6xx and 7xx series. Of course, this is far from complete support (there are also 8xx and Gxx ), but already something. In the blog itself, the developers express the hope that their work will help ARM , which in our opinion is very subtle.

We also mentioned support for case-insensitive names for the ext4 file system, or, to put it bluntly, support for case-insensitive names in the ext4 file system. The latter can be called a full-fledged change in the Linux kernel and an important one. Now, for successful matching of names, full byte matching of strings is not needed - just a match of names in Unicode is enough, which will greatly please fans to use the Register . In general, this topic is recommended to read the relevant article "Case-insensitive ext4" .

In general, the patch-laptop for Linux 5.2 is very extensive. It describes the changes in the operation of file systems, memory management, networking, compatibility with ARM and so on and so forth. So those who are tightly and versatile communicates with Linux, should be familiar with the full patch-laptop .