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.
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.
24 July 2022 - Expensive Debug Kernel - 19 Comments
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.
1 July 2022 - Linux-Firmware Binaries - 32 Comments
To this point Fedora out-of-the-box has been restricted to a filtered subset of Flathub packages when enabled via GNOME Software or GNOME Initial Setup. However, legal has now cleared Fedora for allowing unfiltered/unrestricted access to Flathub, allowing a far greater selection of Flatpaks to become available on Fedora Linux with the plan for this to begin with Fedora 37.
For the Fedora 37 cycle Fedora CoreOS is hoping to be promoted to an official release "edition" alongside the likes of Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server.
While many Red Hat open-source projects end up being relatively instant successes that then end up being widely adopted in the open-source community, Red Hat's Stratis Storage effort seems to be trending as one of the exceptions. Red Hat continues investing in Stratis but it doesn't seem to have the sizable adoption or widespread interest that tends to come with most of their projects. In any event, Fedora 37 later this year should ship with the newest Stratis tech.
Fedora developers are weighing adding an option to the default compilation flags for Fedora 37 that can enhance the performance profiling and debug-ability of generated packages but possible performance overhead implications -- possibly a few percent based on prior figures.
23 June 2022 - -fno-omit-frame-pointer - 15 Comments
To organize efforts around improving Fedora Linux for heterogeneous computing, a new special interest group "SIG" is looking to be established to help ensure the success of Fedora in the world of XPUs, the growing and very diverse software ecosystem around accelerators, etc.
Fedora Server working group stakeholders are looking at offering an optimized KVM VM disk image as part of their offerings with the F37 release later this year.
3 June 2022 - Fedora 37 KVM-Ready Image - Add A Comment
Fedora will keep around its legacy BIOS support that was decided earlier this month after a proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support to focus resources on UEFI-only booting. However, Fedora will be relying more on the community to maintain that legacy boot support and as such the Fedora BIOS Boot SIG (Special Interest Group) is now established.
20 May 2022 - Fedora Legacy BIOS Support - 28 Comments
Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35.
Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now.
4 May 2022 - Fedora 37 Will Still Support BIOS - 49 Comments
Fedora Linux is looking at tightening up its cryptographic policies with next year's Fedora 38/39 releases but for Fedora 37 later this year they will likely begin warning users around the planned changes.
30 April 2022 - Fedora Cryptographic Policies - 5 Comments
Bringing back memories from the time that Fedora multi-week release delays were pretty much a given, Fedora Linux 36 has once again been delayed and now won't be out until at least 10 May.
Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support.
While during these crazy times it feels like Fedora transitioned from Yum to DNF yesterday, it's already been a half-decade since the DNF package manager has been the default on Fedora. Next year with Fedora 38 they are looking at further evolving package management by way of MicroDNF.
In addition to removing legacy X.Org drivers, deprecating legacy BIOS support, and signing RPM contents another Fedora 37 change proposal submitted this past week is for upgrading against RPM 4.18.
Adding to the interesting changes being worked on for Fedora 37 due out later this year is the removal of legacy X.Org drivers. Fedora is looking at removing the legacy graphics driver paths that are incompatible with running Wayland.
8 April 2022 - Dropping Old Drivers! - 67 Comments
For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems.
With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed.
When it comes to system recovery on Linux, users are most often only left with a command-line for trying to recover from a failed kernel boot, borked boot loader configuration, or other show-stopping problems. With Fedora Workstation right now they have only their CLI-based Linux recovery process but are eyeing the possibility of creating a complementary GUI-based recovery environment.
4 April 2022 - GUI-Based Linux Recovery - 38 Comments
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller took to Twitter on Sunday with a long series of tweets of his personal opinion going after NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and encouraging the company to be more like Intel and AMD with regards to open-source driver support.
As part of wanting to drop unused i686 package builds from Fedora Linux, Fedora developers -- and in particular the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee -- want to know from the community what i686 (x86 32-bit) packages users still make use of.
The latest change to be proposed for the Fedora 37 release later this year is encouraging package maintainers to drop unused 32-bit x86 (i686) packages.
8 March 2022 - Useless i686 Packages - 35 Comments
The Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite immutable OS spins of Fedora Linux are looking at mounting /sysroot read-only by default for where the operating system assets are stored.
While curl and the cURL library are most commonly used for HTTP(S) and FTP usage, this widely-used software also supports a plethora of other network protocols. In order to save disk space by default and also exposing its cURL packages to less security bugs by default, Fedora is looking at shipping "minimal" versions by default of its cURL packages.
Following the nasty local privilege escalation vulnerability that was disclosed last month for Polkit's pkexec, Fedora developers are hoping to make pkexec optional later this year with Fedora 37.
Red Hat with the Fedora community have been working for years now to make Cockpit very capable for a web-based interface for administering Linux servers. In addition to this year working on shifting their Anaconda installer to a web-based interface that makes use of Cockpit, from this web management portal they are wanting to make it easier to setup file sharing with NFS and Samba.
20 January 2022 - Cockpit UI Control - 10 Comments
It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components.
Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs.
A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level.
Fedora had another successful year and anecdotally enthusiasm around the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution grew a lot this year among Linux power users. As has been the case for years, Fedora releases have been among the first to feature new Linux innovations from the desktop down the stack -- many of which have been spearheaded by Red Hat engineers. Helping its cause for the past several years is that they have managed to deliver releases on-time (or close to it) and haven't been like some of the past distant releases that were rather buggy and other headaches stemming from the constant flow of changes. Fedora 34 and Fedora 35 this year were great releases and continued pushing the distribution on an upward trajectory.
Fedora is often on the bleeding-edge of changes for tier-one Linux distributions but not all of them are very technical in nature but sometimes just cosmetic alterations. Among the latest batch of change proposals for next spring's Fedora 36 is to change the default font.
Fedora 36 is planning to use plocate as its new provider of the locate command for finding files on file-systems. Plocate should make for even faster locating of files on disk as well as doing so using less CPU cycles.
Fedora 36 feature work continues building up for what will make another exciting update to this Linux distribution come April. The latest approval is more exciting work on the OSTree / CoreOS front.
While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year.
