by 
Michael Tremer announced today the release of IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159, a new version for the hardened open source Linux distribution targeting firewalls and routers.
The biggest change in the IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 release is a new major kernel update as the firewall/router distribution is now powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS series, which will receive updates for five years, until December 2026.
As expected, the new kernel version brings better hardware support with its many new and updated drivers, especially network drivers, increased networking throughput through zero-copy TCP receive and UDP and Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT congestion control (BBR) for decreased latency of the firewall in the network when forwarding packets.
The Linux 5.10 LTS kernel update in the IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 release also improves wireless throughput and latency with Airtime Queue Limits by enabling the use of all the “Bufferbloat” algorithms, greatly improves support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) hardware, and improves the overall security of the system by boosting the protection against CPU hardware vulnerabilities.
“This update is a huge step for everything that is going on under the hood of IPFire. We are hopeful to build many new features on this and make IPFire a much more modern and better to use system,” reads the release announcement.
The IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 release also ships with an updated toolchain powered by GCC 11.1, GNU C Library 2.33, and GNU Binutils 2.36.1, as well as updated packages like Samba 4.14.6, ClamAV 0.103.3, Wireshark 3.4.7, and tftpd 5.2.
Among other noteworthy changes, IPFire now features improved ARM support for the 32-bit ARM architecture, which was changed from armv5tel (ARMv5) to armv6l (ARMv6), switches to Zstandard compression format for the ISO installation image for faster decompression times during installation and faster compression times during the build process, as well as better unattended mode in the installer on EFI systems.
IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 is available for download right now from the official website as ISO or USB images for x86_64 (64-bit) and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures. Existing users are urged to update their installations as soon as possible (a reboot will be required for the new Linux kernel version to be correctly installed).
Last updated 3 years ago
