The testing of the beta version of the Fedora Linux 40 distribution has begun. This beta release marks the transition to the final testing stage, where only critical bug fixes are allowed. The release is scheduled for April 23. The release covers Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora Onyx, and Live images delivered in the form of spins with the following user environments: KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, LXQt, Budgie, and Sway. The builds are configured for x86_64, Power64, and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 40 are:
- The desktop in Fedora Workstation has been updated to GNOME 46.
- The edition with the KDE desktop has been updated to KDE 6, which uses the Wayland protocol. Support for X11-based sessions has been discontinued, and the XWayland DDX server is now used to run X11 applications in a Wayland session. The reason for discontinuing support for X11 sessions is attributed to the categorization of the X.Org server in RHEL 9 as deprecated, with plans to completely remove it in the significant future release RHEL 10. Factors contributing to the retention of only Wayland support include the replacement of fbdev drivers with the simpledrm driver in Fedora 36, which works correctly with Wayland, and the introduction of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
- The atomically updatable user distributions developed by the Fedora project are unified under the Atomic Desktops brand, but the long-standing atomic builds have retained their old names. As a result, Fedora Silverblue based on GNOME and Fedora Kinoite based on KDE, along with Fedora CoreOS and Fedora IoT, have kept their previous names, while the new builds Fedora Sericea and Fedora Onyx are now distributed under the names Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
- Package versions have been updated, including LLVM 18, GCC 14, binutils 2.41, glibc 2.39, gdb 14.1, PHP 8.3, Ruby 3.3, Go 1.22, Java 21, AMD ROCm 6, Boost 1.83, 389 Directory Server 3.0.0, Podman 5, PostgreSQL 16, TBB (Thread Building Blocks) 2021.8, SQLAlchemy 2, and Kubernetes 1.29.
- The NetworkManager configurator has a built-in mechanism for detecting IPv4 address conflicts in the local network (RFC 5227), which involves sending a test ARP packet before binding an address to a network interface (if a response is received, the address is occupied and will not be assigned). For wireless connections, a separate permanent MAC address is assigned (stable-ssid mode in NetworkManager).
- The build tools Mock (mock-core-configs), Koji, and Copr have been updated to use the DNF 5 package manager for installing build dependencies in the chroot environment used for package assembly. The transition of the distribution itself to DNF 5 is expected in the next release.
- In the DNF package manager, metadata loading for file lists included in packages is disabled by default. Such data is rarely used but is large in size and slows down performance.
- The package with the OpenSSL 1.1 library has been removed due to the end of support for this branch. Dependencies tied to OpenSSL 1.1 have been switched to OpenSSL 3.0. The package python3.7 has been removed.
- The Zlib library has been replaced with the Zlib-ng fork, which is API-compatible with zlib but offers additional optimizations to improve performance.
- The generation of delta-updates for RPM packages, which allows downloading only changed data compared to the already installed version of the package during updates, has been discontinued. Support for deltarpm has been disabled in DNF and DNF5.
- Passim has been added, which caches server to distribute frequently requested files in the local network without directly contacting the main servers and without relying on global CDNs.
- The pam_userdb module has been switched from using BerkeleyDB to GDBM due to the discontinuation of support for the BerkeleyDB 5.x branch and the transition of the BerkeleyDB 6.x branch to an unacceptable license. Bogofilter has been switched to use SQLite instead of BerkeleyDB (libdb).
- The Image Builder tool has been used for assembling Live images of Fedora Workstation, supporting reproducible builds and providing users with a simpler process for customizing images.
- The osbuild tool has been utilized for building minimal images for the ARM architecture.
- The Kiwi tool has been adopted for creating Fedora Cloud Edition images instead of ImageFactory.
- The packages for Kubernetes have been restructured.
- Fedora IoT, the edition for Internet of Things devices, has been transitioned to use boot containers created with the OSTree toolkit and boot technology.
- The wget utility has been replaced with wget2, and the iotop utility with iotop-c.
- In the Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite editions, the bootupd program has been included, which performs bootloader updates.
- The libuser library has been declared obsolete, having been unsupported and already unused in other Fedora packages (SSSD has long been used for LDAP support in the distribution). The passwd package implementing the passwd utility based on libuser has been removed, and the similar utility from the shadow-utils package is now utilized instead.
- Work has been done to prepare for the inclusion of a newer version of the C language standard in GCC by default, which signifies the cessation of default support for certain deprecated language features, such as implicit function declaration and implicit assignment of type int.
- The second stage of the transition to a modernized boot process proposed by Lennart Poettering has been implemented. The differences from the classic boot consist in using a unified kernel image (UKI), generated in the distribution's infrastructure and digitally signed by the distribution, instead of the initrd image formed on the local system during the installation of the kernel package. The UKI image combines in one file the handler for loading the kernel from UEFI (UEFI boot stub), the Linux kernel image, and the initrd memory-loaded system environment. When invoking the UKI image from UEFI, the ability to verify the integrity and authenticity through a digital signature is provided not only for the kernel but also for the contents of initrd, verification of which is crucial, as it extracts keys for decrypting the root filesystem in this environment.
In the second stage, the possibility of direct loading of UKI from the UEFI module shim.efi without involving a separate bootloader (grub, sd-boot) has been implemented, with support for using UKI on Aarch64 architecture systems and a version of the UKI image prepared for cloud environments and secured systems. of virtual machinesIn the first stage of Fedora 38, support for UKI was added to the bootloader, installation and update tools for UKI were implemented, and an experimental UKI image was created for booting virtual machines with a limited set of components and drivers.
- A ready-to-use package with the PyTorch machine learning framework has been added to the repository, available for installation with the command 'dnf install pytorch'. Currently, the package includes only components for CPU computations, but future releases plan to add support for GPU and specialized NPU accelerators.
Source: opennet.ru
