As a move ultimately for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well, Red Hat developers working on Fedora are planning to transition the RPM database (RPMDB) away from the long-standing Berkeley DB to using SQLite.
Fedora News Archives
1,189 Fedora open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Fedora 32 Beta was deemed unready for release on Thursday during the initial Go/No-Go meeting but after reconvening twenty-four hours later the remaining blocker bugs were addressed.
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller recently talked about his vision for the Fedora Project over the next decade and it to become an "operating system factory", among other advancements he hopes to see out of the project in the 2020s. A one-sentence vision for Fedora is now drafted as their vision statement.
Issues with Fedora's 32-bit ARM Xfce desktop spin will no longer be treated as a release blocker for the Linux distribution but instead the Fedora Workstation for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) will be considered a blocking issue.
Fedora 30 and Fedora 31 users will soon see Linux 5.5 come down as a stable update, but before then you can help if so inclined to test this new kernel revision on Fedora.
There had been a proposal to better compress the Fedora 32 install media via SquashFS without the nested EXT4 file-system setup for its live images and also ramping up the XZ compression. But this proposal was rejected at yesterday's engineering meeting on the basis that a more optimal compression path could be utilized.
Another alternative to slow initramfs generation could be distributing pre-built initramfs images to users. An additional benefit of that is possibly better security with measured boot capabilities, a matter currently being discussed by Fedora stakeholders.
Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations.
Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up.
One of the changes planned for Fedora 32 has been to enable EarlyOOM by default to better handle low memory situations either due to the system running with minimal RAM or under memory pressure. But the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to reach a decision over this default.
Fedora CoreOS has graduated out of its preview state and is now considered ready for general use.
Back in December was the proposal to finally enable FSTRIM by default for Fedora 32 in benefiting solid-state storage. Today the formal approval was given by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee to go ahead with this long overdue change.
Python scripts may be running noticeably faster come the release of Fedora 32 in April.
Separate from the whole Python 2 removal effort with the Python 2.7 that is EOL'ed since the start of the year, Fedora 33 due out later this year is looking to be their first release dropping the even older Python 2.6 series.
A late change proposal for Fedora 32 would jump the shipped Mono package from version 5.20 to version 6.6.
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has shared his vision for Fedora over the next decade and is encouraging discussions about the direction of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution over the next five to ten years.
This morning's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting approved more changes for this spring's release of Fedora 32.
While Fedora 32 is already making it so CD / DVD install issues shouldn't block releases given most users are doing USB-based installations for the past number of years, Fedora is still trying to decrease the amount of space the install media takes up regardless of CD/DVD/USB media.
For months there has been many different discussions over the Linux desktop's poor performance when under memory pressure / out-of-memory type situations. That has resulted in some upstream work so far like GNOME GLib's GMemoryMonitor as well as discussions by distribution vendors about what solutions they could enable today to help the low memory situations. Fedora 32 could begin shipping and using EarlyOOM by default to help in this area.
Fedora Linux has long been well known for always shipping with bleeding-edge GCC compiler releases even if it means a near-final pre-release, thanks in part to Red Hat's significant engineering resources to GCC and the GNU toolchain in general. With Fedora 32 it's expected to be no different with having the upcoming GCC 10 compiler.
Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team.
Fedora continued serving at the forefront of many Linux distribution innovations over the past decade and the largely Red Hat driven platform continued contributing their work back upstream from countless GNOME features to hardware improvements/fixes, UEFI "flicker-free boot" crossing the finish line, good hardware firmware updating support, and much more.
Adding to the interesting list of proposed features for Fedora 32 would be update-alternatives handling of /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ to more easily and seamlessly allowing pointing them at alternative compilers.
In addition to finally enabling FSTRIM for flash-based storage devices, another arguably long overdue change slated for Fedora 32 to benefit performance is compiling packages by default with link-time optimizations (LTO) by the GCC compiler.
While Ubuntu, openSUSE, and numerous other Linux distributions make use of FSTRIM by default for helping with performance and wear-leveling on NVMe/SSD/SD-card storage, Fedora notably has not enabled the support by default but that could change next year in F32.
Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond.
Fedora Linux is on track to deliver another bleeding-edge compiler toolchain stack with Fedora 32 due out this spring.
Last month was a proposal for Fedora 32 to disallow empty passwords for local users by default but at today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they completely shot down that proposal.
Fedora users eager to see the Linux 5.4 stable kernel can engage by helping to test their newly-spun 5.4-based kernel image prior to it officially landing as a stable release update.
Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release.
The Fedora Workstation working group has been weighing the matter of the GNOME Software "app store" recommending/promoting proprietary software. But this isn't something that is done out-of-the-box but rather when activating Flathub where Flatpaks can be installed for both open and closed-source software.
Fedora will be adding the Nano text editor to their default Fedora Workstation installs as complementary to Vi but their stakeholders intend to submit a system-wide proposal that would change the default installed editor from Vi to Nano.
A surprisingly controversial proposal for Fedora 32 is to shift from dynamically linking Python 3 with the libpython3.X.so library to static linking. The change can yield double digit percentage improvements to Python scripts but at the cost of larger on-disk space.
Fedora 31 is now officially available as the latest update for this prominent Linux distribution backed by Red Hat and continuing uninterrupted under IBM's ownership of Red Hat.
While Fedora 31 didn't make its original release target of this week due to being delayed by installer issues and DNF bugs, those blocker bugs have now been addressed and this next installment of Red Hat's Fedora Linux is coming out next week!
Fedora developers had been trying to ship Fedora 31 for their original release target of next Tuesday, 22 October, but that isn't going to happen due to remaining blocker bugs.
Several Red Hat developers are looking at improving the CPU thermal management capabilities for Fedora Workstation 32 and in turn possibly helping Intel CPUs reach better performance.
Firefox 71 is bringing another important Wayland improvement!
While Fedora recently began spinning workstation/live images for POWER (PPC64LE) at least as a work-in-progress, it won't be made a formal feature of the upcoming Fedora 31.
Not particularly surprising considering Fedora tends to always ship with a bleeding-edge toolchain, but for their Fedora 32 release to kick off 2020 they are planning for GNU Binutils 2.33.
On top of many other changes for Fedora Workstation 31, this next release of Fedora Linux continues to improve the experience for proprietary multimedia codecs where the patents have lapsed.
Fedora Workstation 31 when it debuts at the end of October should be another great release for the Fedora project and continuing to ship with the bleeding-edge yet stable packages and latest upstream innovations.
Fedora 31 beta has released on time! It's not only on-time but it's also coming with many exciting updates.
If you are running the likes of the Raptor Blackbird for a POWER open-source desktop and wanting to run Fedora on it, currently you need to use the Fedora "server" CLI installer and from there install the desired packages for a desktop. But moving forward, Fedora is beginning to spin Workstation and Live images for PPC64LE.
This shouldn't come as much surprise, but the upcoming Fedora 32 will offer the latest "L.A.M.P." stack components.
While Fedora 31 isn't even out yet, looking ahead to the Fedora 32 release next spring is a plan to switch firewalld as Fedora's default network firewall from its existing iptables back-end to the more modern nftables back-end.
Following Chromebooks switching to BFQ and other distributions weighing this I/O scheduler for better responsiveness while maintaining good throughput capabilities, beginning with Fedora 31 there will be BFQ used as well.
The month-old proposal for the upcoming Fedora 31 Linux distribution release to stop with their i686 repositories for Everything and Modules was voted on today by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
Similar to the recent upstream Linux kernel discussions over the poor Linux desktop experience when in memory pressure situations particularly with systems having limited amounts of RAM, Fedora developers are discussing ways to improve this experience as well.
The newest initiative within the Fedora camp is a "Minimization Team" seeking to reduce the size of packaged applications, run-times, and other software available on Fedora Linux.
1189 Fedora news articles published on Phoronix.