Debian 12.4 has been released, bypassing the expected 12.3 version that was due earlier. A last-minute bug impacting Linux kernel 6.1.64 and potentially causing data corruption in the ext4 file system led the developers to omit version 12.3 and launch the update as Debian 12.4 instead.
Once aware of the issue, we took immediate measures to halt the release of Debian 12.3 with several announcements sent out to mailing lists and social media channels advising users to exercise caution with upgrades while we worked to address and fix the issues.
This newest release consists primarily of bug fixes and security patches. This is because Debian’s minor releases are focused solely on system stability rather than adding new features.
The more notable packages receiving bug fixes in this release are Amanda, AWStats, CUPS, Debian Installer, dhcpcd5, Exim4, GIMP, Gnome Shell, MRTG, Mutter, Nvidia Graphics Driver, OpenDKIM, Perl, QEMU, Redis, tzdata, and Xen.
Regarding security, the update includes 65 security patches, with the most significant ones addressing issues in Chromium, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, GRUB2, Tomcat 10, Curl, Samba, OpenSSL, XorgCacti, FFMpeg, and PostgreSQL 15.
Apart from those mentioned above, Debian 12.4 also brings the Linux kernel version up to 6.1.66, which, as mentioned earlier, has received a patch fixing the data corruption bug when using the ext4 filesystem.
Please remember that this update includes no new versions of the “Bookworm” release but only brings bug and security fixes to some packages. So, if you’re already using it, you must run the command below to upgrade your system to the most recent stable Debian 12.4 version.
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgradeRefer to the release announcement for in-depth information on all changes. In addition, a comprehensive list of all packages that have received updates may be seen here.
