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The Raspberry Pi Foundation released today a new version of their official Raspberry Pi OS distribution for Raspberry Pi computers that brings updated components, bug fixes, and various performance improvements.
The biggest change in the Raspberry Pi OS 2023-05-03 release is the kernel bump from the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS to the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS. Of course, this should translate to better performance for your Raspberry Pi computer.
In fact, existing Raspberry Pi OS users like me were already running Linux kernel 6.1 LTS if they would execute the rpi-update command in a terminal emulator. But now, Linux 6.1 LTS is the default kernel on new Raspberry Pi OS images that you can download from the official website if plan on installing on your Raspberry Pi computer.
Various apps have been updated in the new Raspberry Pi OS release. The most important one is Chromium 113, which is Raspberry Pi OS’ default browser. Not only it includes all the latest security updates, but the Chromium 113 release brings WebGPU support by default, which may improve the performance of Web Apps and your overall browsing experience.
Also included are Raspberry Pi Imager 1.7.4, RealVNC Viewer 7.0.1.48981, RealVNC Server 7.0.1.49073, Mathematica 13.2.1, and Matlab 23.1.0. Another interesting update included in this release is the updated VLC hardware acceleration patch, which should offer you better performance when playing video files.
The libcamera and libcamera-apps components have been updated as well to improve IMX296 sensor tuning, improve the handling of audio resampling and encoding using the libav library, improve the performance of Qt preview window rendering, improved thumbnail rendering, add support for 16-bit Bayer in the DNG writer, add handling of generalized statistics, and address an overflow issue that would cause incorrect calculations in the AGC algorithm.
Also updated is the picamera2 library, which received an MJPEG server example that uses the hardware MJPEG encoder, an example showing a preview from two cameras in a single Qt app, the ability for the H.264 encoder to accept frame time interval for SPS headers, advertise the correct profile/level, and support constant quality parameter, as well as to add new Exif DateTime and DateTimeOriginal tags.
A handful of bugs were addressed as well, including an occasional segfault in the CPU temperature plugin, an X11 server crash that occurred when changing the screen orientation, as well as X11 server DPMS not working, and some new language translations have been added.
Last updated 12 months ago
