14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the LibreELEC Linux-based operating system for Raspberry Pi and numerous other embedded devices announced today the release of LibreELEC 8.2 stable series.
LibreELEC 8.2 has been in development for the past several months, during which it received several beta versions that implemented many of the new features and improvements. The OS is now powered by the latest Kodi 17.5.1 open-source media center to allow users to transform their SBCs into HTPCs (home theater PCs).
"LibreELEC 8.2.0 provides a mid-year bump to improve hardware support on Intel and Raspberry Pi hardware. It also resolves minor support issues on a range of devices and fixes a number of important security issues affecting the core OS reported in recent months," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in LibreELEC 8.2
First and foremost, LibreELEC 8.2 is fully patched against the recently disclosed WPA2 KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack) security vulnerability, as well as the Broadpwn Wi-Fi vulnerability for Raspberry Pi boards. Also for Raspberry Pi, LibreELEC 8.2 brings the Linux 4.9.43 LTS kernel and fixes CEC button press issues.
The generic kernel has been rebased on Linux kernel 4.11.8 for other supported devices except for Raspberry Pi, and LibreELEC 8.2 comes with updated RTL8192EU and RTL8188EU drivers, Nvidia 384.90 and Nvidia Legacy 340.104 proprietary graphics drivers, as well as up-to-date linux-firmware and misc-firmware packages.
Hauppauge DualHD tuner support has been reverted in this release, which introduces support for the Xiaomi Mi Box Bluetooth remote and Xbox One (DVB-C/T/T2) USB tuner, Slice and Slice3 projects, and ALSA sound system configurations for the IQAudIO Digi+ sound card on Raspberry Pi devices.
Among some of the updated components included in LibreELEC 8.2, we can mention Samba 4.6.8 and LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) 0.9.4d. The OpenSSL and LibreSSL packages have been updated as well, along with the Amlogic 3.14 kernel to allow the use of kernel wireless-regdb on all related devices.
SMB2 support has been enabled by default in the kernel, along with SMB3, and the LibreELEC settings add-on was improved to expose more Samba configuration options. Other than that, the Virtual project was merged into Generic, and there's now a dummy Tvheadend 4.0 add-on to make sure 4.0 is disabled during upgrades.
Several buildsystem changes are present as well in LibreELEC 8.2 to make the backporting process from master a lot easier than before. You can download LibreELEC 8.2 for one or many of the supported embedded devices right now from the official website. We recommend updating to this release as soon as possible.