Fedora 39 this autumn is looking at boosting its vm.max_map_count default to better match the behavior of SteamOS / Steam Deck and allowing more Windows games to run out-of-the-box with Steam Play.
Fedora News Archives
1,189 Fedora open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Fedora 38 has been released today after meeting its early release target.
The much anticipated Fedora 38 is cleared for releasing on Tuesday. There are no delays with the Fedora 38 cycle and in fact hitting their "early target date" for shipping on 18 April.
Fedora Workstation developers and those involved at Red Hat have been working to improve the state of disk encryption on Fedora with a end-goal of possibly making the installer encrypt systems by default.
With the Fedora 39 release later this year the developers are planning on moving to RPM 4.19 as the newest version of their packaging format.
I've been playing around with the current development state of Fedora 38 the past few days on several test boxes. While only reaching Fedora 38 Beta this week, it already feels quite polished and stable. To sum it up quite simply, Fedora Workstation 38 is looking like it will be another fantastic release and continuing the modern Fedora Project trend of putting out a bleeding-edge Linux distribution yet production-ready and with far less blemishes compared to releases from years ago.
The beta of Fedora 38 is out and on-time this morning for those wanting to test this latest major update to Fedora Linux.
With the Fedora Linux change completion deadline passed, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has been eyeing up their approved list to see what didn't make the cut for Fedora 38 that is due out in April.
For many years now there has been delta RPM support built into Fedora to allow just downloading the binary difference between the currently installed RPM package and the updated version. While this made sense during the days of limited Internet connectivity/bandwidth, delta RPMs haven't proven useful in years and now Fedora Linux is considering removing this support.
Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) has been around for many years while with the recent shift to the oneAPI umbrella as oneTBB, in an effort to improve the usability and simplicity of the API they made a number of changes to its interfaces as well as having removed some previously common interfaces. This has led Fedora Linux to running on an older TBB version the past few years while for Fedora 39 later this year they are planning to modernize their Threaded Building Blocks packaging.
The Fedora Project has been working on drafting its strategic plan to help shape the Linux distribution over the next five years. A draft of the plan written up by the Fedora Council has been published and is currently seeking community feedback on their road-map planning.
In addition to the in-development Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda web UI based installer that has been in the works, Fedora IoT is rolling out a new installer of its own to ease deployments around edge computing and Internet of Things devices.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee recently signed off on the proposed "Unfiltered Flathub" feature that makes it easier to enjoy the full collection of software offered by Flatpak's Flathub service.
Last week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on Fedora 38 shipping with its planned bleeding-edge compiler toolchain, most notably including the upcoming GCC 13 compiler.
Last month a change proposal was filed for aiming to yield faster reboots and shutdowns of Fedora Linux by shortening the time window that services can block the shutdown process. A modified version of that change proposal has now been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
At today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) more features were approved for the Fedora 38 release coming up in April.
In addition to Fedora 38 now allowing "no-omit-frame-pointer" to enhance profiling/debugging with possible performance costs, this next Fedora Linux release is also planning to use "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3" compiler defenses to further bolster security.
The past several months saw much discussion over a proposal to add "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" as a default compiler flag to Fedora Linux that would improve profiling/debugging but with possible performance implications that can vary based on the application/workload. While just over one month ago FESCo rejected that change, they re-voted today and decided after all to allow this change to happen but to ensure that packages can easily opt-out if they find performance regressions. By Fedora 40 they will also re-visit the matter to determine if the benefits and performance costs are justified.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of several more changes / new features planned for Fedora 38.
Fedora has a tradition of always shipping with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components and central to that is always having the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At times this up-to-date toolchain quest has meant shipping a release candidate / near-final GCC build when it comes to their Q2 release of the year that often lands right around the same time as the annual GCC feature release. Fedora 38 will be another release to again aim for the very latest GNU compiler toolchain components.
A change proposal to be evaluated still by FESCo would help ensure that system shutdowns and reboots can happen faster on Fedora Linux.
Fedora is looking at disallowing X.Org/XWayland clients of difference CPU endianness from connecting to the X.Org Server. Such a combination of different endianness between the X.Org Server and clients is rather rare these days but is yet another "large attack surface" of the X.Org Server that needs addressing.
Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place.
Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end.
Budgie desktop lead developer (and former Solus Linux developer) Joshua Strobl has proposed a Fedora Budgie desktop spin for Fedora 38.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
While the Sway Wayland compositor has long been available via the Fedora package repositories, Sway fans within the Fedora space are hoping that Fedora 38 will ship with a Fedora Sway spin being available for an easy and out-of-the-box experience for running this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.
The past few months there has been a change proposal discussed around adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default compilation flags for packages being built for Fedora Linux. Adding this option would improve the profiling/debug-ability of the packages but with possible performance implications. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now rejected this contentious change proposal.
For the past two decades the RPM package manager software has relied upon its own OpenPGP parser implementation for dealing with package keys and signatures. With Fedora 38 they plan to have their RPM package shifted to use the Rust-written "Sequoia" parser instead.
Red Hat engineers are working on changing their BIOS RAID "fake RAID" support within the Fedora installer for the F38 cycle.
Proposed last month was a Fedora 40 change proposal for "porting Fedora to modern C" that amounts to tightening its C language legacy support. This change focused on ensuring packaged C code is compliant with strict C99 compilers has now been signed off on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).
After some release setbacks -- most recently by that OpenSSL security vulnerability -- Fedora 37 is now officially released.
While the release next month of Blender 3.4 is planning to ship with Wayland enabled, Fedora Linux 37 users are expected to soon find their packaged Blender versions already running with the Wayland support enabled.
In addition to Fedora 38 looking at creating Phosh images for mobile devices, Fedora developers now have clearance to go ahead and overhaul how their Fedora Linux live images are assembled.
It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience. Separately, a change proposal is expected for also introducing a Fedora Linux image with KDE Plasma Mobile.
Fedora Linux 37 has been running behind schedule and today it was decided to push it back now to mid-November over a "critical" openSSL vulnerability yet to be made public.
A change proposal drafted for next year's Fedora 40 is looking at "porting Fedora to modern C" by ensuring the contained C source code of packages is compliant with strict C99 compilers.
This should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's tendency to ship with bleeding-edge package versions, but Fedora Linux 38 next spring will offer PHP 8.2 for those wanting to run a LAMP stack on this modern, Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.
The proposal for accelerating GnuTLS with kernel TLS has been approved for Fedora 38 that will debut next spring.
For Fedora Linux users currently making use of Mesa's VA-API support with the open-source AMD graphics driver or similar and using it to speed-up H.264, H.265, or VC1 decoding, you may soon be out of luck and will have to fall-back to either using CPU-based decoding or be relying on an unofficial/third-party Mesa build.
Fedora 37 beta has been successfully released on-time as a development test release ahead of next month's planned stable release.
Fedora Linux releases whether they be development/beta snapshots or the stable releases are known for slipping all too often. Fedora will often delay due to blocker bugs as they aim to deliver a bleeding-edge yet reliable Linux distribution and thus a week or two delay here and there isn't uncommon at all. While they have been delivering more timely releases than in the past with their notorious delays, for Fedora Linux 37 Beta they have delivered on the feat of an on-time release.
With Fedora 37 approaching release at the end of October, more feature changes for Fedora 38 next spring are continuing to be discussed. One of the interesting proposals this week is enabling acceleration of GnuTLS using the kernel TLS (kTLS).
With Fedora 39 next autumn it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux.
Red Hat has been working on a web-based UI for its Anaconda operating system installer and for the Fedora 37 release this autumn they are planning to have an optional preview of this new installer interface.
There are a few Fedora Spins/Labs versions at risk of being removed with Fedora 37 this autumn unless new maintainers step up.
Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks.
The existing GTK-based Anaconda installer is to remain the default installation experience for Fedora 37 this autumn but a change proposal has been filed with hopes of having a public preview image for Anaconda's next-gen web-based interface for installations.
It should be hardly surprising at all for longtime Linux users aware of how Fedora Linux tends to always ship with the most modern open-source compiler toolchain support possible, but for Fedora 37 this autumn they again are planning for the latest and greatest.
The size of the linux-firmware.git tree continues to grow with Linux continuing to support more and more modern hardware that is increasingly reliant upon firmware blobs for operation. Most Linux distributions like Fedora end up installing this entire set of Linux firmware files that can easily be 200~300MB even though most systems only use a few select files. With Fedora 37 later this year they are hoping to better deal with the situation by splitting up of linux-firmware and only installing sets of firmware packages depending upon the actual hardware in use.
1189 Fedora news articles published on Phoronix.