Fedora 28 To Work On Better VirtualBox Integration, Hardening Packages & Stronger Crypto

With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up.

Recently proposed for Fedora 28 include:

VirtualBox Guest Integration - This is aobut having the VirtualBox guest drivers and tools ship by default in Fedora Workstation. This is part of an effort by Red Hat for getting more of the VirtualBox drivers mainlined in the Linux kernel. Basically if all goes well this means a smoother out-of-the-box experience when running Fedora on top of Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Hardening Flags - Improving the security/hardening of compiled Fedora packages by using some additional features by default. The flags looking at being enabled by default are for stack clash protection, C++ standard library hardening, control flow protection on x86-64, and .got.plt isolation in Binutils.

GHC 8.2 - The latest Haskell compiler.

Google Noto - Korean and Japanese font improvements.

Fontconfig 2.13 - This fontconfig update adds configuration file description support, allow sharing of caches, improved footprint on caches, and variable fonts support.

Strong Crypto Settings - Improving the default cryptography settings on Fedora 28 for enhanced security and working on eventually disabling the less secure algorithms.

These features are still subject to approval by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee. Fedora 28 is planned for release in early-to-mid May (pending delays) while the feature freeze is coming up in February. Stay tuned for more details on Fedora 28 followed by benchmarks when the time comes!