Beta testing of the Fedora Linux 38 distribution has begun. The beta release marked the transition to the final stage of testing, in which only critical bug fixes are allowed. The release is scheduled for April 18th. The release covers Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, and Live builds shipped as spins with KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, LXQt, Budgie, and Sway. Assemblies are generated for x86_64, Power64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 38 are:
- Implemented the first stage of transition to the modernized boot process proposed by Lennart Pottering. Differences from the classic boot come down to using instead of the initrd image generated on the local system when installing the kernel package, the unified kernel image UKI (Unified Kernel Image) generated in the distribution infrastructure and certified by the distribution's digital signature. UKI combines a handler for booting the kernel from UEFI (UEFI boot stub), a Linux kernel image, and an initrd system environment loaded into memory in one file. When calling the UKI image from UEFI, it is possible to check the integrity and validity of the digital signature of not only the kernel, but also the contents of the initrd, the validation of which is important because in this environment keys are extracted to decrypt the root FS. At the first stage, UKI support has been added to the bootloader, tools for installing and updating UKI have been implemented, and an experimental UKI image has been created, focused on booting virtual machines with a limited set of components and drivers.
- The RPM package manager for parsing keys and digital signatures uses the Sequoia package, which offers an implementation of OpenPGP in the Rust language. Previously, RPM used its own OpenPGP parsing code, which had unresolved issues and limitations. The rpm-sequoia package has been added as a direct dependency to RPM, in which support for cryptographic algorithms is based on the Nettle library written in C (it is planned to provide the ability to use OpenSSL).
- Implemented the first stage of implementation of the new package manager Microdnf, which is replacing the currently used DNF. The Microdnf toolkit has been significantly updated and now supports all the main features of DNF, but at the same time it is characterized by high performance and compactness. The key difference between Microdnf and DNF is the use of C instead of Python for development, which allows you to get rid of a large number of dependencies. Some other advantages of Microdnf: more visual indication of the progress of operations; improved implementation of the transaction table; the ability to display information in reports on completed transactions that is issued by scripts built into packages (scriptlets); support for using local RPM packages for transactions; more advanced input completion system for bash; support for running the builddep command without installing Python on the system.
- The desktop in Fedora Workstation has been updated to the GNOME 44 release, which is expected to be released on March 22. GNOME 44's new features include a new screen lock implementation and a "background apps" section in the status menu.
- The Xfce user environment has been updated to version 4.18.
- The formation of assemblies with the LXQt user environment for the AArch64 architecture has begun.
- The SDDM display manager defaults to a login interface using Wayland. The change allows the login manager to be migrated to Wayland in builds with the KDE desktop.
- In builds with the KDE desktop, the Initial Setup wizard was removed from the distribution, since most of its features are not used in KDE Spin and Kinoite, and the initial settings are configured during the installation stage by the Anaconda installer.
- Granted full access to the Flathub application catalog (disabled the filter that removed unofficial packages, proprietary programs and applications with restrictive license requirements). If there are flatpak and rpm packages with the same programs, when using GNOME Software, the Flatpak packages from the Fedora project will be installed first, then the RPM packages, then the packages from Flathub.
- The formation of builds for mobile devices has begun, supplied with the Phosh shell, which is based on GNOME technologies and the GTK library, uses the Phoc composite server running on top of Wayland, as well as its own squeekboard on-screen keyboard. The environment was originally developed by Purism as an analogue of GNOME Shell for the Librem 5 smartphone, but then became part of the unofficial GNOME projects and is now also used in postmarketOS, Mobian and some firmware for Pine64 devices.
- Added build of Fedora Budgie Spin with Budgie GUI based on GNOME technologies, Budgie Window Manager (BWM) and own implementation of GNOME Shell. Budgie is based on a panel that is similar in organization to the classic desktop panels. All panel elements are applets, which allows you to flexibly customize the composition, change the layout and replace the implementations of the main panel elements to your liking.
- Added build of Fedora Sway Spin with Sway custom environment built using Wayland protocol and fully compatible with i3 tiled window manager and i3bar. To set up a complete user environment, related components are offered: swayidle (background process with the implementation of the KDE idle protocol), swaylock (screen saver), mako (notification manager), grim (creating screenshots), slurp (selecting an area on the screen), wf-recorder ( video capture), waybar (application bar), virtboard (on-screen keyboard), wl-clipboard (clipboard management), wallutils (desktop wallpaper management).
- The Anaconda installer uses the mdadm tool instead of dmraid to support firmware-provided software RAID (BIOS RAID, Firmware RAID, Fake RAID).
- Added a simplified installer for installing Fedora IoT edition images on IoT devices. The installer is based on coreos-installer and uses a direct copy of a stock OStree image without user interaction.
- Live images have been upgraded to support automatic inclusion of a layer for persistent data storage when booting from a USB drive.
- In the X server and Xwayland, due to potential security issues, by default, clients are not allowed to connect from systems that have a different byte order.
- The "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" and "-mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer" flags are enabled by default in the compiler to enhance profiling and debugging capabilities and to diagnose performance issues without having to recompile packages.
- Packages are built with inclusion in the protection mode "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3", which detects possible buffer overflows when executing string functions defined in the string.h header file. The difference from the "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2" mode comes down to additional checks. Theoretically, additional checks can lead to performance degradation, but in practice, the SPEC2000 and SPEC2017 tests did not show any difference, and during the testing process, there were no complaints from users about performance degradation.
- Decreased timer for force quitting systemd units during shutdown from 2 minutes to 45 seconds.
- The packages with the Node.js platform have been restructured. Provided the ability to install different branches of Node.js on the system at the same time (for example, now you can install nodejs-16, nodejs-18 and nodejs-20 packages at the same time).
- Updated package versions, including Ruby 3.2, gcc 13, LLVM 16, Golang 1.20, PHP 8.2, binutils 2.39, glibc 2.37, gdb 12.1, GNU Make 4.4, cups-filters 2.0b, TeXLive 2022, ImageMagick 7, PostgreSQL 15.
Source: opennet.ru