Longhorn, a distributed block storage system for Kubernetes, has released its latest release candidate, Longhorn v1.4.4-rc1. This cloud-native storage solution is built using Kubernetes and container primitives.

Longhorn is known for being lightweight, reliable, and powerful. It can be easily installed on an existing Kubernetes cluster with a single kubectl apply command or by using Helm charts. Once installed, Longhorn adds support for persistent volumes to the Kubernetes cluster.

One of the key features of Longhorn is its implementation of distributed block storage using containers and microservices. It creates a dedicated storage controller for each block device volume and synchronously replicates the volume across multiple replicas stored on multiple nodes. The orchestration of these storage controllers and replicas is done using Kubernetes.

The v1.4.4-rc1 release of Longhorn introduces bug fixes and improvements, primarily focused on stability. Users are encouraged to try out the release and provide feedback. The Longhorn project appreciates all contributions.

For installation, Longhorn supports three methods: Rancher App Marketplace, Kubectl, and Helm. Detailed installation instructions can be found here.

Before upgrading to Longhorn v1.4.4 from v1.3.x/v1.4.x, it is important to read the important notes and ensure that the Kubernetes cluster is at least v1.21. The live upgrade from these source versions is not supported until the GA release. Upgrade instructions can be found here.

There are no deprecations or incompatibilities to note in this release. However, users are advised to check for any outstanding issues after the release on the Longhorn GitHub page here.

The v1.4.4-rc1 release also includes several enhancements, improvements, bug fixes, and stability and resilience updates. Notable improvements include the addition of disk status Prometheus metrics, removal of Longhorn engine path mismatch logs, and prevention of accidental deletion of Longhorn settings. A full list of these enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

The contributors to this release include @ChanYiLin, @PhanLe1010, @c3y1huang, and many others.

Longhorn continues to be a leading storage solution for Kubernetes, providing users with a reliable and powerful distributed block storage system. The release of Longhorn v1.4.4-rc1 brings important bug fixes and improvements, enhancing the stability of the platform. Users are encouraged to try out the release and provide feedback to further improve the Longhorn project.

OpenWrt 23.05, the open-source Linux operating system for routers and resource-constrained headless embedded systems, has just been released with significant updates and improvements. This release comes with over 4300 commits since the previous release of OpenWrt 22.03, which was launched a little over a year ago.

One of the notable features of OpenWrt 23.05 is its expanded device support. It now supports over 1790 devices, which is an increase of about 200 devices compared to the previous release. Some of the new targets include the Qualcomm IPQ807x target for WiFi 6 SoCs, the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 subtarget for WiFi 6/6e chips, and the HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched targets for RISC-V development boards.

In terms of security, OpenWrt 23.05 has switched from using wolfSSL to MbedTLS as the default. This change was made because MbedTLS has a smaller footprint and offers a more stable ABI and LTS releases. However, it’s worth noting that MbedTLS lacks support for TLS 1.3. Therefore, users who require TLS 1.3 can still switch to using wolfSSL.

Another significant addition in this release is support for packages written with the Rust programming language. Some examples of these packages include bottom, maturin, aardvark-dns, and ripgrep. This expansion of supported programming languages provides developers with more flexibility and options when creating applications for OpenWrt.

OpenWrt 23.05 also brings updates to its core components. It now utilizes Linux 5.15 as the foundation for all targets, as well as updated versions of busybox, musl libc, glibc, gcc, and inutils. Additionally, the networking components have seen upgrades, including the use of the hostapd master snapshot from September 2023, dnsmasq 2.89, dropbear 2022.82, and cfg80211/mac80211 from kernel 6.1.24.

For users looking to upgrade from OpenWrt 22.03, the migration from swconfig to DSA configuration that was introduced in the previous releases is no longer an issue. Most people should be able to upgrade smoothly using the sysupgrade utility, which will preserve the configuration. However, it is still recommended to back up the configuration before proceeding with the upgrade.

OpenWrt 23.05 is now available for download, and users can find binary images for their specific targets on the OpenWrt website.

Source: CNX Software – Embedded Systems News.

The release candidate for FreeBSD 14.0 has been made available as the developers work towards the stable release in early November, reports Phoronix. FreeBSD 14 will be the last series to support 32-bit systems, with FreeBSD 15 dropping support for 32-bit hardware platforms. However, FreeBSD 15 64-bit systems will still be able to run 32-bit binaries. It is expected that 32-bit binary compatibility will be supported until at least FreeBSD 16.

FreeBSD 14 includes several notable changes, including the addition of a new utility called “fwget” for fetching firmware packages. Initially, the fwget utility can retrieve firmware for Intel and AMD GPUs. Other changes in FreeBSD 14 include replacing sendmail with dma, Kinst as a new DTrace provider, makefs adding ZFS support, boottrace for capturing trace events during system boot and shutdown processes, kernel TLS offloading for receive-side offloading of TLS 1.3, initial WiFi 6 support in WPA, sh becoming the default shell for the root user, and an updated LLVM toolchain.

One significant improvement in FreeBSD 14 is the increased support for CPU cores. On ARM64 and AMD64 architectures, FreeBSD 14 now supports up to 1024 CPU cores, up from the previous limit of 256 cores. This is particularly notable with the release of the AMD EPYC Bergamo CPUs, which allow for 128 cores and 256 threads per socket. FreeBSD 14 will now allow users to take advantage of these high core count servers.

In addition to the increased CPU core support, FreeBSD 14 also brings faster reboot times, the removal of ISA sound card support, and a new Intel QAT driver with more features and support compared to the previous FreeBSD QAT driver for QuickAssist Technology. Netflix has also sponsored the removal of several old drivers from FreeBSD.

The release notes for FreeBSD 14 provide more details about the upcoming release. The recent FreeBSD 14.0-RC1 release announcement highlights updates to the Linux KPI, various WiFi updates, and a race condition fix as some of the changes in the release candidate. It is expected that there will be at least two more release candidates before FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE is made available around November 7th.

Source: Phoronix.

OpenZFS has announced the release of version 2.2.0, an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager. This release comes with several new features and performance improvements.

One notable new feature is block cloning, which allows for the creation of shallow copies of files or parts of files. This facility is used to implement “reflinks” or “file-level copy-on-write”. Additionally, Linux container support has been added, including support for Linux-specific container interfaces such as renameat(2), overlayfs, idmapped mounts in a user namespace, and namespace delegation support for containers.

Another important addition is the scrub error log, which allows zpool status to report all affected filesystems, snapshots, and clones when a shared corrupt block is found. The zpool scrub -e command can be used to perform a fast, targeted repair of known damaged blocks.

In terms of performance, this release introduces fully adaptive ARC, which allows the ARC to better adjust to highly dynamic workloads and minimizes the need for manual workload-dependent tuning. It also includes optimized SHA2 and Edon-R checksum implementations, as well as improvements in prefetching and general optimization.

For those interested in the technical details, the complete change log and module options are available in the OpenZFS documentation.

Overall, the release of version zfs-2.2.0 brings exciting new features and performance improvements to the OpenZFS/ZFS on Linux community. It is recommended for users who are looking to enhance their server, Linux, DevOps, and home lab environments.

For more information, please refer to the OpenZFS documentation for Linux and FreeBSD, and the complete change log.

Uptime Kuma has released version 1.23.3, bringing several bug fixes and security enhancements. This update includes important changes that users need to be aware of.

First and foremost, due to the security fix in this version, all login sessions will be logged out after updating. This is a necessary measure to ensure the security of the system. Users will need to log in again with their credentials to access the platform.

It is worth noting that if you are using any unofficial or third-party tools with Uptime Kuma, there is a possibility of breaking changes with this update. In such cases, it may be necessary to re-generate an authentication token to ensure seamless integration with these tools.

Now let’s take a closer look at the bug fixes included in this release:

• Fixed an issue where notifications were not working if the configuration was too long. This bug has been resolved thanks to the contribution of @FJBlok.
• Enabled the status page certificate expiry badge for all HTTP(s) monitors. This improvement was made possible by the work of @marvinruder.
• Addressed Kafka producer bugs, ensuring smoother operation of this feature. This fix was made possible by the contributions of @mhkarimi1383.
• Fixed an issue with the incorrect usage of x-forwarded-host. This bug has been resolved thanks to the efforts of @xuexb.
• Resolved a race condition issue in the status page editor, ensuring that all data is saved correctly. This fix was made possible by the contribution of @chakflying.

In addition to these bug fixes, version 1.23.3 also includes security enhancements. One of the notable security fixes is the resolution of a persistent session tokens issue. Previously, there was no way to revoke session tokens even if the password was changed. With this update, users can now revoke session tokens by changing their password. For more information on this security fix, you can refer to the advisory GHSA-g9v2-wqcj-j99g.

openSUSE has announced the availability of Leap Micro 5.5, the latest version of its modern lightweight host operating system. Leap Micro 5.5 is essentially a rebranded version of SLE Micro, so all the documents and release notes from SLE Micro 5.5 are applicable to Leap Micro as well.

It’s important to note that with the release of Leap Micro 5.5, Leap Micro 5.3 has reached its End of Life (EOL). Users of Leap Micro 5.3 are strongly advised to upgrade to either the Leap Micro 5.4 or 5.5 release to ensure access to the latest features, security enhancements, and ongoing support.

One of the standout features of Leap Micro 5.5 is its enhanced support for SELinux. Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) now includes podman-docker and hyper-v support for AArch64, providing users with a more robust and secure computing experience. Leap Micro 5.5 also includes podman 4.4, which introduces podman quadlets. Users can check out the Nextcloud deployment using quadlets to explore this feature. Additionally, Leap Micro ships with podman-docker, a podman wrapper that can be used together with docker-compose.

The container management interface Cockpit has also received notable improvements in version 298. Users can now use Cockpit to manage all of their home workloads, providing a more convenient management solution.

For users new to the immutable OS space, which consists of systems with read-only /root, there is a transactional update guide available to help navigate the update process. Additionally, users can use the Toolbox tool to install additional software without the need for a reboot, making it particularly useful for debugging scenarios where a reboot is not feasible.