What's New in 2018
Welcome to 2018.
It's been almost a month without any single post and i think it's about time that we catch up with all Slackware changes in -current branch as they are getting more excited in this year.
There was a chaos in the early of January when Spectre/Meltdown attack was disclosed. Many vendors/upstreams are releasing new version, helping downstream projects, and backporting to older releases as far as they can. It's still a in-progress effort by many projects and we will still likely to see many changes in the following months, especially in the kernel area.
Back to Slackware development, Patrick has just pushed a new GCC release (7.3.0) which has support for -mindirect-branch=thunk-extern flag which is needed to provide full mitigation of Spectre variant 2 and also push a new kernel built with CONFIG_RETPOLINE=y.Fixes to Meltdown has been pushed earlier when he delivered Linux Kernel 4.14.14 with KPTI enabled. As for Spectre variant 1, it all depends on microcode update. If you are AMD users, you can easily get it by updating to the latest kernel-firmware package found in -current. Intel users will have to install intel-microcode from SBo repository (it's best to be installed alongside with iucode_tool).
Several new packages has been introduced in the current tree since November 2017:
It's been almost a month without any single post and i think it's about time that we catch up with all Slackware changes in -current branch as they are getting more excited in this year.
There was a chaos in the early of January when Spectre/Meltdown attack was disclosed. Many vendors/upstreams are releasing new version, helping downstream projects, and backporting to older releases as far as they can. It's still a in-progress effort by many projects and we will still likely to see many changes in the following months, especially in the kernel area.
Back to Slackware development, Patrick has just pushed a new GCC release (7.3.0) which has support for -mindirect-branch=thunk-extern flag which is needed to provide full mitigation of Spectre variant 2 and also push a new kernel built with CONFIG_RETPOLINE=y.Fixes to Meltdown has been pushed earlier when he delivered Linux Kernel 4.14.14 with KPTI enabled. As for Spectre variant 1, it all depends on microcode update. If you are AMD users, you can easily get it by updating to the latest kernel-firmware package found in -current. Intel users will have to install intel-microcode from SBo repository (it's best to be installed alongside with iucode_tool).
Several new packages has been introduced in the current tree since November 2017:
- libunwind
- id3lib
- easytag
- opus-tools
- opus
- opusfile
- speex
- Mako
- libsodium
- xf86-video-vboxvideo
- lzlib
- plzib
- man-db
- talloc
- tdb
- tevent
- intel-vaapi-driver
- libva-utils
- Migrate to Qt5 and KDE 5
- Migrate to OpenSSL 1.1.x (Support TLS 1.3).