The open-source Linux distribution that focuses on network products such as firewalls, routers, and other security-sensitive devices has been updated. The latest version of IPFire upgrades its Linux kernel to the most recent long-term release, which is currently 5.15 LTS.
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Kernel upgrade is for better hardware support and features
IPFire 2.27 Core 162 is a maintenance release that brings some handy improvements. The kernel upgrade is interesting since the old one, 5.10 LTS, is supposed to be supported until the end of 2026 while the new one, 5.15 LTS, will be supported only until October 2023. The reason behind this action is the wider variety and other features of the Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.
With the new Linux kernel upgrade, the IPFire 2.27 Core 162 has a fully functional NTFS file system. The kernel also brings some performance improvements with its Core Scheduling feature. In their announcement, the team behind IPFire stated that they have done improvements in the kernel to decrease the CPU usage that happens while forwarding a large number of packages.
Time to upgrade for i586 systems
The team also announced that the IPFire 2.27 Core 162 is the last version that supports 32-bit Intel-compatible processors, specifically pointing towards i586 and older ones. For i586 systems, developers advised users to back up the configuration, perform a fresh installation, and lastly restore the backup.
The other improvements that have been done in IPFire 2.27 Core 162 can be seen below:
- IPS: A long-stand bug has been discovered which caused that some TCP connections could not be opened and timed out. This happened on TCP stacks that use the timestamp option and where the first SYN packet does not reach the server. Due to the state of the repeated packet not being considered, the IPS did not allow any SYN-ACK packets back through to the client which caused the connection to time out. This has been fixed and submitted upstream.
- The web user interface has gained a new “help” option which will bring you to the correct page on the IPFire Wiki.
- IPFire Location has added the new “DROP” category (allocated country code XD) which has a curated list of networks that nobody is ever expected to talk to.
- OpenVPN: An error has been fixed which caused to show an “Internal Server Error” after generating root and host certificates
- Dynamic DNS: Fix broken updates freedns.afraid.org after API change
- jwhois has been replaced with an actively maintained version of whois
- The installer will now correctly create EFI boot entries on all BIOSes. This used to fail on ARM64-based machines.
- Updated packages: BIND 9.16.22, bison 3.8.2, coreutils 9.0, dhcpcd 9.4.1, gawk 5.1.1, jansson 2.14, knot 3.1.1, libhtp 0.5.39, libloc 0.9.8, libseccomp 2.5.3, libxcrypt 4.4.26, meson 0.59.2, OpenVPN 2.4.4, OpenSSH 8.8p1, slang 2.3.2, suricata 5.0.8, unbound 1.13.2, xtables-addons 3.18
- Updated packages: ClamAV 0.104.1, dnsdist 1.6.1, libffi 3.4.2, Postfix 3.6.3, strace 5.14, sslh 1.22c, sshfs 3.7.2, Tor 0.4.6.8
Download IPFire 2.27 Core 162 ISO Files
x86_64
File Size: 408MB
SHA256: 16bd363e5b258a51eafdefb3fb07f614f75708c5a0a9fd380c4a660e0c36b131
aarch64
File Size: 402MB
SHA256: 6bd233256c336bd5562683762920871e20ac9ab331e7dd0ed648aa1eb85e4cb9
i586
File Size: 401MB
SHA256: 246bc7f89ad5bebf4398cf4e2e40dbb1ee02885ea61443ec79e9c7b74008149f