Heya folks! After a slight delay, we have synchronization! Coming at you this week are a new kernel, new Mesa, and more.
The -current kernel package has been updated to the latest 6.6 series. If kernel release notes are your jam, they can be found here.
In addition to the usual version bump and hardware enablement we've also made the following changes to the kernel:
- BORE CPU scheduler updated to v3.5.6
- OpenRGB patches added
- Patches from the ASUS-Linux project added for greater support for ASUS hardware
- Patches from the Surface-Linux project added for greater support for Microsoft Surface devices (we're still missing some user-space daemons for some functionality, if you own a Surface device please open an issue on our Github with what isn't working so we can enable it for you)
- Back-ported patches from the kernel development to enable HDR support for AMD GPUs. Note that to use this today requires Gamescope session support that Solus does not currently package and is largely intended for the upcoming Plasma 6 release.
- Intel remapped NVMe support. This is needed so that Intel SATA AHCI controllers in RAID mode will hopefully be usable from Solus (untested as the kernel maintainer does not have such a device)
- Sony Playstation DS4 controllers have had their Bluetooth pollrate decreased to 1ms (from 4ms). This should improve latency for users of these controllers.
- Solus previously used command line argument so that users of old AMD GPUs would use the newer AMDGPU driver instead of the older Radeon kernel driver. This has been changed to a patch which implements the exact same default but in the kernel code itself. This helps cleanup the kernel command line (if you've ever looked at it and noticed
radeon.si_support=0 amongst other arguments then this is what that was for). A user can still override this if necessary.
- Several other patches have been cherry-picked from the ZEN kernel project which should result in improved system responsiveness in certain conditions.
- Several older FUTEX syscalls have been updated to use newer codepaths. This should improve performance when using older versions of Proton for games.
- Patches updating the kernel BBR TCP queuing implementation to BBRv3 have been added. This should improve network performance and latency for a majority of usecases.
- The default font for the TTY has been changed to Terminus. This should look a lot cleaner and be more readable on modern highDPI displays.
Much of this work is in preparation for 6.6 becoming the next LTS kernel for Solus. Please note that some of these features/patches may be dropped in the future if they cause issues or are burdensome to keep updated with future kernel releases.
On the subject of the Solus LTS kernel, if you are a user of the linux-lts package we encourage you to start testing linux-current to see if anything is broken for you! Once 6.7 lands (probably around 6 weeks from now), our LTS kernel will be moved to 6.6. The sooner issues are found, the sooner they can be addressed.
To go along with the updated kernel, Mesalib has been updated to 23.3. It includes many bug fixes since the last update in the 23.2 series, GFX 11.5 support, improved performance and compatibility for Intel/AMD GPUs, especially Intel ARC GPUs, and support for optional game tearing on Wayland. The GFX 11.5 support should mean that we will already be compatible with upcoming AMD APUs on release.
This cycle brings changes to our XFCE4 branding defaults. While we haven't truly released our XFCE edition yet, some of you have gone and installed it anyways, and this may be of interest to you if you have:
- Default panel size increased to 36
- Added launchers to the panel layout for the web browser, file manager, etc
- Thunar will no longer automount removable storage (USB) devices, in line with Budgie and Plasma
Note that because of how XFCE4 settings are stored, these changes may not take effect for current users; settings are saved in each user's home directory, causing the system ones to not be used.
Other updates this week include:
:
- DeepFilterNet is now in the repositories! This is a superior alternative to RNNoise (which is used by Noisetorch amongst other things). While you can certainly install this package manually and configure it manually it's much easier to make sure that EasyEffects is installed (note, EasyEffects only works with PipeWire). Add "Deep Noise Remover" as an effect to your input, configure the attenuation limit until you think it sounds good and you'll be good to go!
- On the subject of PipeWire we've updated to the recently released 1.0.0 along with WirePlumber 0.4.17. We've also added qpwgraph to the repositories as a easy-to-use UI for visualizing and modifying how the PipeWire nodes connect to each other.
- Telegram has been updated to 4.12.2
- The virtualization stack got some updates, QEMU has been updated to 8.1.3, and libvirt to 9.10. We now utilize the new dedicated virtiofsd daemon instead of the removed QEMU subproject. EDK2 UEFI firmware was updated to v202311
- The Qt6 stack got another update to recently released v6.6.1
- libboost was updated to v1.83. This shouldn't have much in the way of user-facing changes, but is important to help keep the technical debt in the Solus repository low. Many thank Joey getting this done!
- Initial support the JPEG XL codec is now in the repository. GNOME, Budgie, and Plasma should all be able to view these files as thumbnails and with the default image viewers. More support for this codec will roll out to other applications over time.
- Theming issues with Qt5 applications on GNOME/Budgie with a dark theme are believed to be fixed by the import of additional upstream patches. Please let us know if you continue to experience issues after the sync.
- openjdk-8, wiredtiger, and mongodb have all been removed from the repositories. openjdk-8 is no longer used by any applications in the Solus repositories and removing it frees us up to spend time on other things. If you still need JDK 8 support for your own applications/uses we highly recommend the Temurin builds from the Eclipse Adoptium project (which is essentially the renamed AdoptOpenJDK project). These builds are considered high quality and should work on Solus just fine. Mongodb/Wiredtiger were removed due to licensing issues, we recommend running the container images as they are well-supported by the Mongodb project and should work well on Solus.
That’s all for this week, folks! Check back next time for more exciting sync news!
Known issues
