Double Debian update: 11.11 and 12.7 arrive at once

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2024-09-04 13:00:13

The latest update to Debian "Bookworm" arrives at the same time as the last ever update to "Bullseye," and there's trouble ahead for Nvidia legacy users.

The end of August saw two new point upgrades for Debian fans. The project published updates for two separate releases: one for Bookworm in the form of Debian 12.7, and, on the same day, the last for Bullseye with Debian 11.11.

This is the sixth point release for Bookworm because 12.3 never happened. As usual, no package versions are bumped: 12.7 collects together all the updates released since 12.6, so it contains just over 50 updates and bug fixes.

One thing it doesn't contain is the user-space tools for maintaining bcachefs file systems. The package bcachefs-tools has been dropped, with maintainer Jonathan Carter describing it as too buggy to be anything but experimental. Although for now the file system itself is still implemented in C, release 1.2 of the user-space tools were rewritten in Rust, which caused headaches for the package maintainers, as he elaborates in a lengthy blog post.

This isn't a critical problem right now. Debian 12 uses kernel 6.1 and bcachefs only entered the kernel with the release of kernel 6.7 at the start of the year. That means there hasn't been a long-term kernel with built-in bcachefs yet – but there surely will be soon, and some time after that, stable-release distros will start supporting it, at which point working user-space tools will be essential.