Release Notes for Alpine 3.19.0

Base System

iptables-nft

The /sbin/iptables{,-save,-restore} symlinks now point to xtables-nft-multi instead of xtables-legacy-multi. This means they use the nftables kernel backend instead of the legacy iptables one.

Since the new iptables- binaries also don't use the iptables backend, to work with any existing rules and save them, you need to install iptables-legacy and use iptables-legacy-save.

Because mixing backends is not supported, you should reboot your system if you have to use the iptables commands after upgrading.

netns

The OpenRC package contains a patch to make it possible to start most services in netns namespaces. See also netns.

cgroups v2

Cgroups version 2, or "unified", is now the default cgroup mode in OpenRC. The previous default was "hybrid", both version 1 and version 2.

Others

HashiCorp packages

Due to the relicensing of HashiCorp software to BUSL-1.1, a non-Open-Source license, the following software has been removed from Alpine:

• Consul
• Nomad
• Packer
• Terraform
• Vault

Our discussion on the topic can be found here.

opentofu, a fork of Terraform, is available in our testing repository for users of our rolling release, edge.

Java 21

The latest LTS java release, openjdk21, is now available in the community repository.

KDE

KDE Applications have been upgraded from 23.04.x to 23.08.x. KDE Frameworks have been upgraded from 5.105.0 to 5.112.0. Note that the KDE Frameworks packages have been renamed to add a 5 suffix in preparation for the upcoming KDE 6 release in the next Alpine release. Everything should automatically be upgraded properly but if problems occur make sure to check if the right renamed packages are installed.

GNOME

GNOME packages have been updated to 45. As part of that release, Cheese has been replaced by Snapshot, and Eye of GNOME by Loupe as the default apps for taking and seeing pictures, respectively. In additions, GNOME Photos was dropped as being mostly unmaintained.

Yggdrasil v0.5

yggdrasil was upgraded to 0.5.x and the new routing scheme is incompatible with previous versions. "Nodes running this new version will not be able to peer with earlier versions of Yggdrasil" (v0.5.0 release notes, v0.5 blog post).

GNU C Library Compatibility Layer

libc6-compat was removed in favor of gcompat from Adélie Linux.

ifupdown

The ifupdown aport (not busybox-ifupdown) was unmaintained and removed in favor of the preferred ifupdown-ng.

LibreOffice

Use openjdk17 as dependency, Java supports for aarch64 is enabled.

Upgrades

• Linux 6.6
• GCC 13
• LLVM 17
• Kea 2.4
• Xen 4.18
• Git 2.43
• Perl 5.38
• PHP 8.3
• PostgreSQL 16
• SQLite 3.44
• Redis 7.2
• Node.js (lts) 20.10
• Node.js (current) 21.4
• QEMU 8.1
• Ceph 18.2
• GNOME 45
• LXQt 1.4
• wlroots 0.17
• Go 1.21
• Rust 1.72
• Crystal 1.10
• Racket 8.11
• ECL 23.9.9
• Erlang 26
• zlib 1.3
• libsodium 1.0.19
• ICU 74.1
• Protobuf 24.4
• fmt 10
• PipeWire 1.0.0
• LibreOffice 7.6.3.1

Raspberry Pi

linux-rpi package has been simplified: there is now a single kernel flavor for each architecture. Previous linux-rpi2 and linux-rpi4 kernel packages are therefore replaced by linux-rpi.
config.txt file is now generated by raspberrypi-bootloader-common.

This also means that the prebuilt images and files to download and use for the various models have changed, see the Compability list for guidance.