Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week you ‘only’ had to update your machine 5 times – for the snapshots 0505, which was for some reason not announced, 0506, 0507, 0509, and 0510 (the last one fresh off the press). 0508 would have been ok, but QA was slightly slower than OBS and so the new snapshot moved to QA before the old one was completely tested. Oops. Anyway, nothing was lost, all good things from that snapshot are still shipped, just a day later.

So, what did those 5 snapshots bring you? The most interesting changes include:

• Mesa 22.0.3
• Mozilla Firefox 100.0
• KDE Plasma 5.24.5
• Meson 0.62
• gpg 2.3.6: Up to five times faster verification of detached signatures
• Linux kernel 5.17.5
• gnome-shell & mutter 42.1 (late arrivals to the GNOME 42.1 update)
• Poppler 22.05.0
• Virtualbox 6.1.34
• GCC 12.1 – with snapshot 0510, gcc12 has become the distro default compiler. All packages have been attempted to be rebuilt. This also means that the recently enabled FullRelRo support (-z now) is enabled across the board. There are currently about 370 build failures reported in openSUSE:Factory (non-ring packages)
• systemd 250.5

This makes for quite an impressive list in just one week. Granted, a few of those things had been in staging areas for a while (days to weeks).

And as you’re already used to, this is no reason to stop. Au contraire: the stagings are already filled again with the following presents:

• KDE Gear 22.04.1
• Attempting to build the distro using FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 instead of FORTIFY_SOURCE=2
• Linux kernel 5.17.7
• GStreamer 1.20.2
• Perl 5.34.1
• Python 3.10 as the default interpreter

More than a month after preparing the default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed to be switched to GNU Compiler Collection 12, the latest snapshot passed openQA and is making GCC12 the default compiler for the rolling release.

A complete rebuild of snapshot 20220510 is syncing with the mirrors and should soon be a zypper dup away from users changing their rolling release’s default compiler. Being a complete rebuild, it might take some time to sync with the mirrors, but developers can soon have the newest GCC for their development.

“OpenQA did not notice anything weird in this snapshot, the reported errors are generally unchanged to 0509, which is a good sign,” wrote release manager Dominique Leuenberger on the factory mailing list. “Hope you will enjoy the snapshot - now built with GCC12”!

The snapshot the day prior, 20220509, updated git 2.36.1. The minor git update provided a few fixes to include a fix for the git submodule update. Text editor vim took care of a Common Vulnerability and Exposure in its 8.2.4877 version update; the fix of CVE-2022-1381 closes a vulnerability that could cause the crashing software, the modifying of memory and was capable of a possible remote execution. Virtual machine users had five CVE fixes with the virtualbox 6.1.34 update. VM host and guest fixes affected by the 5.14 Linux Kernel were also fixed with the update. However, Tumbleweed users received the update of the 5.17.5 Linux Kernel in the snapshot. The 22.05.0 update of the PDF rendering library poppler had code improvements and added the TSV mode, which is a mode to edit a table like a file. Encrypting and signing data and communications is up to five times faster with verification of detached signatures thanks to the gpg2 2.3.6 update and GnuPG doubled the detached signing speed and the AES256.OCB encryption speed. Other updates in the snapshot included gnome-shell 42.1, libstorage-ng 4.5.10, yast2 4.5.3, autoyast2 4.5.1, and z3 4.8.17.

The 100th version of Mozilla Firefox arrived in snapshot 20220506. The new version brings in Picture-in-Picture that supports video captions on websites that use WebVTT (Web Video Text Track) format. Firefox spell checking now checks spelling in multiple languages. An update of clamav 0.103.6 fixed a CVE for a possible infinite loop vulnerability in the TIFF file parser and another CVE of a possible memory leak in the HTML file parser. KDE users had an update of plasma 5.24.5 in the snapshot. The updated Plasma improved the stability of different source integration with the Discover Flatpak backend. The update also fixed the unlocking of Wayland sessions with KWin. An update of the 3D graphics driver Mesa fixed most of the major drivers in the 22.0.3 release and added the AArch64 architecture. An update of openconnect 8.20 added support for the Array Networks SSL VPN. The openexr package, which is a professional-grade image storage format for the motion picture industry, updated to version 3.1.5; it updated the Continuous Integration workflow matrix and fixed a build failure for one of the Linux distros. Other packages to update in the snapshot were font rendering library freetype2 2.12.1, LibreOffice 7.3.3.2, re2c 3.0 and caching DNS resolver unbound 1.15.0.

PHP 8.1 is available off the shelf in openSUSE Tumbleweed. I will shortly prepare a PHP 8.1 / tumbleweed version of the maintaina Horde containers. These will initially be broken due to some outdated language constructs. As PHP 7.4 will EOL by the end of this year, I decided not to bother with PHP 8.0 and ensure compatibility with PHP 8.1 right away, while staying compatible with PHP 7.4 until end of year. This is not fun. PHP 8.x provides several features which allow for more concise code. I will not be able to use them.
This also means that for the time being I will produce code which you may find more verbose than necessary. While Constructor promotion is mostly about being less verbose, Readonly Properties and Enums kill some of the pro-method arguments in the eternal discussion if getter methods or public properties are more appropriate interfaces. Union Types and Intersection Types allow a flexibility of method interfaces which PHP 7.4 can only emulate. You can get far by type hints for static analysis combined with boilerplate guard code inside a method and dropping type hints all along or using insufficient surrogate interfaces. But it is really not shiny. Maintaining software which shows its age has its tradeoffs.

So I enabled support for up to 16384 columns in Calc by default some time ago, but just getting it to work was not necessarily the end of the work. Making Calc have 16 times more columns means that any operation that works on entire columns is suddenly 16 times slower, or even worse. Similarly this could easily lead to 16x more memory used. So the support not only needs to work, but it also needs to be usable.

It theory adding a number of empty columns to the end of a spreadsheet should not make a difference, but in practice it does. With 1024 columns it is not as necessary to ignore those empty columns as it is with 16k, and a lot of the code dates back to the times when Calc supported even fewer colums (256?), where a being little inefficient here or there didn't show. But now it suddently did.

For example, if you protect or hide all unused columns until the end of the spreadsheet, then hitting the right arrow key on the last accessible cell makes Calc check all cells to the right for whether it's possible to go into them. And checking whether a column is hidden requires searching the list of column information, which is not trivial (it's compacted in order not to waste memory). The barely noticeable cost of this with 1024 columns got large enough to cause noticeable delays. Fortunately the ColHidden() function is smart enough to return the first and last column in the compacted range where the flag is equal, the code doing the cursor navigation just up until now didn't bother using that information, but now it needed to do so.

Another example, and that's quite a large topic, is allocating columns. If most of those new columns are not actually used, then it makes sense to allocate them only when needed, right? That will save memory, and it will make things faster too, because there is no need to check those empty columns. That idea got implemented back when this 16k work was started by others, adding e.g. function GetColumnsRange() that clamped the range to the allocated columns, but the problem is that in practice this is not as simple as that.

Except then, GetColumnsRange() clamping to allocated columns becomes incorrect, because now it's possible to have set data even beyond allocated columns, such as this bold flag. So I changed GetColumnsRange() to simply return the given range, without any adjustments, and then added the better-named GetAllocatedColumnsRange() for cases where the code knows it wants only the allocated range.

Somewhat similarly to the bold case, merely showing or going to an unallocated column should not allocate it. Otherwise hit e.g. Ctrl+Right one time too many and the cursor going to column XFD would make all columns get allocated. But that causes yet another complication - I am now at an unallocated column and all operations should either detect the column is not allocated and return, or allocate the column if needed. The initial 16k work added CreateColumnIfNotExists() exactly to protect such accesses and allocate the column if needed. It's just that this needed adding to quite many places, and some were still missing it, and others were calling it unnecessarily causing unnecessary column allocations. So I needed to work on these over time. I eventually went as far as change Calc to initially allocate just one column. Since before that Calc used to allocate 64 columns by default, a number of places missing such checks kept working because normally people didn't work with more than 64 columns (and so this 64 default was a reasonable choice at the time, as there was really a lot to check and fix). Now that I have changed this to just one column and fixed all tests, it looks like I've rooted them all out (at least I'm still getting only very few bugreports about something breaking :) ).

Drawing, somewhat unexpectedly, turned out to be a possible performance problem too. There are few ways in which cells to the left can affect drawing of cells to the right. If you enter a too-long text into a cell, it will overflow to the right, into the space of the next cell, or possibly even several cells. So when Calc is drawing let's say a couple of cells around the 10000th column, it actually needs to check also all the 10000 columns before. Somebody back in the day thought about optimizing it, and so before Calc draws cells, function FillInfo() first collects information about all the cells to draw and also all the cells to the left. What possibly(?) was an optimization with 256 or 1024 column is a problem with 16384 columns. Even allocating and clearing all the memory actually had a noticeable performance impact. Sadly, as sometimes happens to be the case with optimizations from the OpenOffice.org times, whoever wrote this made it slow. Function FillInfo() collects all data necessary for drawing a cell into struct CellInfo, and all that info is collected also for all the cells to the left, even though most of it is not used for them. So I had to find out what was necessary and split that out (and provide proper abstraction, because real programmers back in the day used direct data access, right).

I expect the real test of this comes when it becomes part of the LibreOffice 7.4 release or Collabora Online. But so far it seems to work rather well.

This work is funded/sponsored by DEVxDAO as part of its mission to support open source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we ‘only’ managed to get out 5 snapshots. Over the weekend, we had a dracut submission in the mix that happened to break in a few scenarios, resulting in an incomplete initrd. Of course, we caught this in openQA and did not release those snapshots. In the end, we release snapshots 0428, 0501, 0502, 0503, and 0504.

the snapshots contained these major changes:

• Poppler 22.04.0
• cURL 7.83.0
• elfutils 0.187
• GNOME 42.1 (mutter and gnome-shell still pending)
• pipewire 0.3.51
• llvm 14.0.3

A little bit of movement in the staging areas, and an ‘old friend’ is back on the list. The current topics being worked on are:

• Mozilla Firefox 100
• Meson 0.62
• gpg 2.3.6
• Linux kernel 5.17.5
• GCC 12.1 as the default compiler
• some fdupes changes: aid with reproducible builds (order dups by name)
• Python 3.10 as default interpreter (Staging:A for the curious ones)

Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed flowed out this week and the rolling release also gave Microsoft Windows users a newer Windows Subsystem for Linux image.

A newly published WSL image of Tumbleweed in the Windows Store arrived on April 25. Users of the WSL image are encouraged to leave a review on the website for the developer tool.

The latest snapshot, 20220504, included the second LLVM update this week. The updated 14.0.3 version includes Application Programming Interface and Application Binary Interface changes for the new major LLVM 14 version. An update of libpipeline 1.5.6 fixed the handling of leading whitespaces for the C library used for manipulating pipelines of subprocesses in a flexible and convenient way. An update of sqlite3 3.38.3 pushed a fix that had effected missing rows in the output due to overly aggressive optimizing the automatic-index and Bloom-filter construction that used an inappropriate ON clause term. An update of yast2-trans had multiple Japanese, Polish, Slovak, Catalan and Brazilian Portuguese translations. The GPS daemon and library that supports USB and serial GPS devices, gpsd, updated to version 3.24. The new version now works with the open-source implementation of Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol 2.0. Other packages to update in the snapshot were swtpm 0.7.3 and unixODBC 2.3.10.

The 20220502 snapshot featured changes to the English dictionary package words; it updated from version 2015.02.15 to 2020.12.07 and had various new words added from previous version updates included in the five year jump. Several RubyGems packages were updated in the snapshot. One of those was the update of rubygem-gyoku 1.4.0, which translates Ruby Hashes to XML; the update removed Rubinius support and added options to allow for prettified XML outputs. The dpdk update in the snapshot had a Peripheral Component Interconnect change that assigns a driver pointer before mapping. Other packages to update in the snapshot were fribidi 1.0.12, power-profiles-daemon 0.11 and libX11 1.8, which is supposed to resolve a number of long-standing bugs with the libxcb integration.

The 20220501 snapshot updated the rolling release with GNOME 42.1; the minor version provided translation updates, API changes and a fix for a build GTK4 option. Daniel Stenberg discussed several Common Vulnerability and Exposure fixes in the version video coveraging curl 7.83.0, which landed in the snapshot. One of those was CVE-2022-22576, which could allow for the reusing OAUTH2-authenticated connections without properly ensuring the connection was authenticated with the same credentials set for transfer. There was an update of pipewire 0.3.51 that provided improvements for codec switches when a device is disconnected and Advanced Linux Sound Architecture should now work again on 32-bits in the pipewire package; improving the handling of audio and video under Linux! GNOME’s virtual filesystem gvfs updated to version 1.50.1; it had some API changes that fixed a couple hangs and crashes. The gvfs package wasn’t the only filesystem update in the snapshot. An update of btrfsprogs 5.17 arrived in the snapshot and it had some cleanup and refactoring; the update also included improved build documentation for the rollback filesystem. A massive amount of RubyGems packages were updated in the snapshot and there were several libraries updated as well. Other notable packages to update in the snapshot were LLVM 14.0.1, nano 6.3, aws-cli 1.23.1, redis 6.2.7 and more.

People using fetchmail will have noted an update in snapshot 20220428. The update to version 6.4.30 provided security fixes, added a wolfSSL compatibility workaround and updated Serbian, Romanian, Vietnamese and Spanish translations. Package manager yarn 1.22.18 fixed some breakage in url.resolve that was introduced by Node.js 17.7.0, which caused network errors. The regressions were fixed on the 17.7.1 version of Node.js as well. Translations were made in the yast2-firstboot 4.5.2 update. The PDF rendering package poppler 22.04.0 fixed some content that, while written correctly, wasn’t displaying correctly with Adobe Reader. The package also had code improvements and fixed a few small memory leaks. OpenSSL3 gateway support was made in the update of freerdp 2.7.0. Other packages to update in the snapshot were SDL2 2.0.22, ell 0.50 and more.

Intro

NetworkManager was used already a long time for the majority of openSUSE Tumbleweed installations, except for server, MicroOS and Kubic. But more and more users requested NetworkManager also for this flavours, since wicked is missing some functionality (like 5G modem support) or there are k8s network plugins, which only support NetworkManager. And since MicroOS Desktop was already using Networking, it was a logical choice to switch completly. So openSUSE MicroOS and openSUSE Kubic are now using NetworkManager as default instead of wicked since quite some time.

Configuration files

As of today there are no plans to automatically switch a system from wicked to NetworkManager. The reason is: depending on the configuration, it may be as easy as just replacing wicked with NetworkManager and everything will continue to work, or, in worst case, everything needs to be re-created from scratch for NetworkManager. There is no feature parity between this tools, so an automatic conversation may not work in all cases.

The /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-* files should be compatible, but it’s not clear if there are no corner cases where they are incompatible. A migratoin should be pretty easy in this case. But if a native wicked xml configuration is in use, a manual migration of the configuration has to be done.

Migration

If the network configuration got created during installation or if only ifcfg-* files are used, the switch to NetworkManager should be very simple. Just replace wicked with NetworkManager:

# transactional-update shell
-> zypper in --no-recommends NetworkManager
-> rpm -e wicked wicked-service
-> systemctl enable --now NetworkManager
-> exit
# reboot

Call For Volunteers

The openSUSE.Asia Summit is an annual openSUSE Asian conference, attended by contributors and enthusiasts from all over Asia. The event focuses primarily on the openSUSE distribution and community, its applications for personal and enterprise use, and open source culture. Since 2014, openSUSE.Asia Summit events had been held offline and thus, a great opportunity for the community to meet.

However, due to COVID-19, the summit was canceled in 2020.In 2021,the online summit was organized by the team India.

What Will openSUSE.Asia Summit 2022 Be?

• openSUSE.Asia Summit 2022 is going to be a hybrid event.
• We will have centralized online summit.
• Each country/city could make different offline part.

Asian-wide part (online + offine satellite):

• Will be held around 4:00-6:00 UTC, easy to join from any Asian cities.
• keynote, invited talks etc.

Local part (online and/or offine):

• Each country/city could organize local offine event based on COVID-19 restrictions.
• Content is up to local; talks, workshops, meet up, etc.

Expectations From The Volunteers

We are looking forward to volunteers to make this event happen. Volunteers can be from anywhere this year.

The volunteers are expected to:

• Attend regular online meeting to prepare Asian-wide part. (currently Friday 13:00 UTC, with Slack chat)
• Organize local event, adjust schedule with Asian-wide part.
• Help on online conference, and coordinate the meeting schedule with other volunteers. host offine event by talking to Asian committee if you need any support.

If you are interested in volunteering, please send an email to opensuseasia-summit@googlegroups.com with your short introduction by Monday, May 30th, 2022.

When I attended the openSUSE Asia Summit in 2019, I asked my friends in Indonesia about their experience in setting up the mirror for the Indonesian users.

Earlier this year, when Luboš Kocman visited Mauritius, we spoke about it again.

Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from cloud.mu, who were willing to sponsor a server for mirror purposes. That was just perfect timing. I had started discussions with an ISP but then cloud.mu was not just willing to provide the server & bandwidth resources but their speed to deploy and assist was even more commendable.

Once the server was ready, the next step was to contact openSUSE admins to update the DNS records for opensuse.mu. I sent my request to the openSUSE Board for the purchase of the domain a long time ago. Until now I used to run a small blog for openSUSE tips & tutorials on opensuse.mu. The domain is owned by SUSE and mananged by the openSUSE admins, i.e the Heroes team.

After a few trials to sync from rsync.opensuse.org and other mirrors closer to Mauritius, I contacted the Heroes to get access to stage.opensuse.org,  the restricted rsync server of openSUSE. Then, it was a matter of a few days to sync all that content.

Finally, the openSUSE mirror for Mauritius was ready.

Compared to other regions, where there are several mirrors in the same country, the whole African continent had only two openSUSE mirrors until now. One managed by TENET (Tertiary Education and Research Network) in South Africa and the other one by Liquid Telecom in Kenya. Mauritius joins that list as the third mirror in the African region, thanks to cloud.mu.

How to switch to the openSUSE Mauritius mirror?

Switching to the Mauritian mirror is easy. First, remove the current repos that you have by either running zypper lr to identify them and zypper rr repo-name to remove the repos, or go to /etc/zypp/repos.d and remove the .repo files of the openSUSE repositories. If you have repos for other applications, e.g Google Chrome, VS Code etc, leave them.

Then, if you're using Leap, you can set up the Leap 15.3 OSS, Non-OSS and Update repositories.

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/oss openSUSE-Leap-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Non-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-Non-OSS

If you're using Tumbleweed, add the following repositories.

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Non-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/tumbleweed openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Update-OSS

The mirror contains files for the x86_64 architecture only. If there is a need for other architectures, I'll do the necessary. Ping me on social media or send a mail to ishwon@opensuse.org.