IPFire 2.27 (Core 159) VM images Available for VirtualBox and VMware

IPFire team released the updated version of IPFire 2.27, which is a stable release designed for firewalls. “This is the official release announcement for the next major release of IPFire: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 159. It comes with a brand new kernel based on Linux 5.10 and an updated toolchain as well as general bug fixes and a large number of improvements. This is a major update for IPFire, as it rebases the IPFire kernel on Linux 5.10, the latest long-term supported release of the Linux kernel. Support for many new drivers, improved support and performance for existing drivers making IPFire more compatible with new, and powerful with existing hardware. Most notably are many network drivers as well as virtualised communication with the hypervisor in the cloud. Networking throughput has been increased through zero-copy TCP receive and UDP and Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT congestion control (BBR). Those changes will also decrease the latency of the firewall in the network when forwarding packets. Wireless will have improved throughput and better latency with Airtime Queue Limits which practically enables use of all the “Bufferbloat” algorithms on wireless. Support for 64-bit ARM hardware has been massively improved and we were able to drop a large amount of custom patches who have been upstreamed into the Linux kernel. Furthermore we have improved security of the system through improved protection against CPU hardware bugs additional hardening from attacks from the user-space…” Read complete release announce of IPFire 2.27 (Core 159) here.

You can download images for VirtualBox & VMware from here.