Release Notes for Alpine 3.21.0

As always, make sure to read Upgrading Alpine to a new major release when upgrading to a new release.

If you experience any issues with the upgrade, please let us know and file an issue in our repositories.

Important changes

OpenSSH service requires restart

From the 9.8_p1 release, and on, of openssh, openssh-server is split into two binaries (/usr/lib/ssh/sshd-session and /usr/sbin/sshd). Due to this change, it will not be possible to ssh into a system that has upgraded from a release prior to 9.8_p1 to this release or later, without restarting the sshd service.

We have previously brought attention to this - https://alpinelinux.org/posts/2024-07-02-openssh-upgrade-edge.html

Managing services has always been out-of-scope for apk-tools, but this one time we will make an exception when the following conditions are met:

You have both the openssh-server and openssh-server-common-openrc packages installed at a version lower than 9.8_p1
The sshd service is started

We will then, post openssh-server upgrade, have a post-upgrade script that will:

Print a message on what is about to happen and why
Restart the sshd service
If the command to restart the service fails for any reason, a warning message will be printed and an error code returned to apk, to be noticed by the end of the package upgrades (this will not interrupt the upgrade process).

We have decided to do this in order to help keep you from getting locked out of your system(s) and be able to fix any issues with the upgrade.

New loongarch64 architecture

Alpine 3.21 is the first release which is available for loongarch64.

Thanks to the support of the team of Loongson dedicated to supporting Alpine Linux and many other contributors.

Preparations for /usr-merge

Plans for /usr-merge are underway and we should be able to finalize it in Alpine Linux, version 3.22.

Much preparation has gone into this release to ensure that the merge happens as smoothly as possible. That included moving the location of some binaries and many libraries from /bin, /sbin, and /lib to their counterparts in /usr. As part of the merge, /usr will be mounted from the initramfs to make sure everybody has all necessary binaries in place.

Users with installations where / and /usr are on separate filesystems (partitions, volumes, disk drives or other) should proceed with care and report any issues. They should also ensure that an entry /usr is added to /etc/fstab before upgrading, and all modules required to mount /usr from the initramfs are added to mkinitfs configuration. New/fresh installations of v3.21 will work out of the box without modification. Please note that / on separate filesystem than /usr is not officially supported.

If you have one of these setups, and have doubts about the configuration, you can open an issue and ping @pabloyoyoista. We will also publish a blog post soon with further information on the timeline and progress of the merge, as well as how the changes may affect users.

Significant changes

Jellyfin

Jellyfin now uses the recommended fork of ffmpeg called jellyfin-ffmpeg by default. If you want to change the default, take a look at the ffmpegpath variable in /etc/conf.d/jellyfin. (!69924)

Jellyfin was disabled for ARM architectures (aarch64 and armv7) and is only available for x86_64. (#16613)

Bats

main/bats was renamed to main/bats-core. There is now a meta package community/bats which contains:

Xen 4.19

qemu-traditional and stubdom are removed from the build in this release, see https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/commit/?id=24217a24da3924039b000eb17c04bf3f01bf1f12

There is still the xen-qemu package, but the regular qemu aport is now built with Xen support, so a qemu-system-* package can be used instead.

You can choose to use it in your xl.cfg(1) like so:

device_model_override = "/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64"
device_model_version = "qemu-xen"

uutils-coreutils

uutils-coreutils is repackaged as a sub-package to uutils in such a way as to be a drop-in replacement for GNU coreutils.

If you have both uutils-coreutils and coreutils installed, the latter will be purged and its symlinks replaced with ones pointing to the /usr/bin/uutils binary. The /usr/bin/uutils-* symlinks, previously provided by uutils-coreutils, no longer exist.

If you prefer to use GNU coreutils, remove the uutils-coreutils package before upgrading, and then add the uutils package, containing the /usr/bin/uutils binary.

A few parts of the uutils aport are also split into uutils-* subpackages, to avoid conflicts or other issues.

linux-firmware

linux-firmware is now compressed with ZSTD compression. If you run a custom built Linux kernel, you need to ensure that CONFIG_FW_LOADER_COMPRESS_ZSTD=y is set in your configuration.

Note-worthy updates

As always, a lot of packages were upgraded. Make sure to read the indivdual release notes of the projects you use.

Linux 6.12
busybox 1.37
GCC 14.2
LLVM 19
Go 1.23
Rust 1.83
PHP 8.4
GNOME 47
KDE Plasma 6.2
LXQt 2.1
Qt 6.8
wlroots 18

GCC 14

The Gnu Compiler Collection was upgraded to 14.2.0 and as a result, all packages built with gcc in Alpine 3.21 are compiled with GCC 14.2.0.

Make sure to read all changes: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/changes.html

LXQt 2.1

LXQt has been updated to release 2.1.0

It now uses Qt6
Many parts of LXQt are now Wayland ready¹, but Wayland ports of the following are pending: screengrab, lxqt-globalkeys, and keyboard indicator, some input settings, as well as settings for monitor, power button, and screen locker.
LXQt Panel has a new default application menu called Fancy Menu.

¹ lxqt-wayland-session has not been packaged yet, but most folks wanting to test on Wayland will want to use it.

Linux 6.12

Alpine 3.21.0 ships Linux 6.12.1 in the linux-lts package.

PostgreSQL 17

This release features postgresql17. We dropped support for postgresql14, and moved postgreSQL15 from main to community.

LLVM 19

We packaged LLVM 19 in our repositories. A total of 5 LLVM versions are supported: llvm19, llvm18, llvm17, llvm16, llvm15.

Significant removals

Disabled packages due to FTBS

The following packages are temporarily disabled because they failed to build. We will try to restore them as soon as possible.

ISC DHCP

If you are still running an ISC DHCP server, you are advised to migrate to a maintained alternative before upgrading to the 3.21 release.

ISC DHCP has been EoL since 2022. They have a guide for migrating to kea here: https://www.isc.org/dhcp_migration/

Up to, and including, the 3.20 version of Alpine, the dhcp aport has the subpackage keama that is a tool for helping with migration from ISC DHCP configuration to ISC Kea configuration.

Alternative DHCP servers packaged in Alpine include:

kea
freeradius-dhcp
dnsmasq
udhcpd - packaged in busybox-extras

Gogs

gogs was removed due to multiple high-severity vulnerabilities for which issues have remained open for a year. The developers of Gogs were contacted multiple times by the Forgejo team but unfortunately received no response. Therefore we have removed Gogs from our repositories. (!75304)

Please consider migrating to forgejo or gitea. Both forks are available in our community repo.

The Gitea fork of Gogs was created in 2016 by contributors who were frustrated with the single-maintainer management model of Gogs. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which was created as a result of the for-profit company Gitea Ltd taking over maintainership (see also https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/).

neofetch

The upstream repository was archived in April and became unmaintained, therefore we have removed it from our repositories. fastfetch provides similar functionality.