IPFire 2.21 - Core Update 122 released

IPFire 2.21 - Core Update 122 released

[The IPFire Project]

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https://www.ipfire.org/news/ipfire-2-21-core-update-122-released

This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.21 – Core Update 122. It
rebases the distribution on the long-term supported Linux kernel 4.14 and many
more improvements and bug fixes have found their way into the distribution.

Please help us to support everyone’s work with your donation [1]!

Please note, that we have split this update into two parts. First, you will need
to install IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 121 and then, the second part will
automatically be installed after. Please be patient and let the system complete
the update. When everything is done, please reboot into the new kernel.


Highlight: Linux 4.14

The distribution was rebased from our old long-term supported kernel to the new
kernel 4.14.50.

Most importantly, this kernel improves the security of the system, increases
performance and makes the core of IPFire more up to date and modern again. This
update also enables mitigation against Meltdown and Spectre on some
architectures. On Intel-based platforms, we update the microcode of the CPUs
when the system boots up to avoid any performance penalties caused by the
mitigation techniques.

Unfortunately, grsecurity is incompatible with any newer kernels and has been
removed. This is connected to the decision of the grsecurity project to no
longer open source their patches. Luckily the kernel developers have backported
many features so that this kernel is still hardened and secure.

ARM systems won’t be able to install this update due to the kernel change which
also requires changes on some bootloaders. For those users, we recommend to
backup the system, reinstall and then restore the backup. The re-installed
system will only come with a single ARM kernel instead of multiple for different
platforms that we had before. It helps us to keep the distribution smaller and
makes development efforts easier.


Misc.

* Updated packages: apache 2.4, beep 1.3 with fixes for CVE-2018-0492, bwm-ng
  0.6.1-f54b3fa, cmake 3.11.2, crda 3.18, ISC dhcp 4.4.1, dhcpcd 6.11.5,
  diffutils 3.1.6, gcc 7.3.0, grub 2.02, htop 2.2.0, iw 4.14, libidn 1.34, nano
  2.9.7, nmap 7.70, openssh 7.7p1, pcre 8.42, powertop 2.9, rng-tools 6.2, sarg
  2.3.11, tar 1.30, u-boot 2018.03, unbound 1.7.1, wget 1.19.5, xtables-addons
  2.13, xz 5.2.4
* The list of trusted Certificate Authorities has been updated and many have
  been removed
* Also we updated firmware for various drivers and baseboards
* The Web User Interface now shows any users logged in on the console

Smaller images due to more efficient compression

We have tried to make the download of the distribution faster and make it use
less space on our servers [2]. As a first step, the flash images have been
merged together and there is only one image that boots on systems with serial
console and normal video output. Secondly, we now compress all images with the
XZ algorithm so that they download faster and even decompress quicker, too.

New partition layout

This release also changes the partition layout of the distribution. We have
dropped the /var partition which was used for log files and data that the system
collected. This data is now located on a single partition together with the OS.
The size of the /boot partition has been increased to 128MB in the default
partition layout.


Add-ons

Updated Packages: clamav 0.100.0, nagios-nrpe 3.2.1

[1] https://www.ipfire.org/donate
[2] https://planet.ipfire.org/post/increasing-download-installation-speed-benefits-of-a-smaller-iso-image