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Fedora Linux 40 distribution release

Fedora Linux 40 distribution released. Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition and Live builds are prepared for download, delivered in the form of spins with desktop environments KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, LXQt, Budgie and Sway. Assemblies are generated for x86_64, Power64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures. Publishing Fedora Silverblue builds is delayed.

The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 40 are:

  • The GNOME desktop in Fedora Workstation has been updated to version 46, which added a global search function, improved performance of the file manager and terminal emulators, added experimental support for the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, improved output quality for fractional scaling, and expanded capabilities for connecting to external services , the configurator has been updated and the notification system has been improved. GTK uses a new rendering engine that is based on the Vulkan API.
  • The KDE desktop edition has been updated to KDE 6, which uses the Wayland protocol. Session support based on the X11 protocol has been discontinued in the basic distribution (you can return it by installing the plasma-workspace-x11 package from the repository). To run X11 applications in a Wayland-based session, the XWayland DDX server is used. The reason cited for discontinuing support for the X11 session is the deprecation of the X.Org server in RHEL 9 and the decision to completely remove it in the future major release of RHEL 10. Among the factors that contributed to leaving only Wayland support is the replacement of the fbdev drivers in Fedora 36 with the simpledrm driver, which works correctly with Wayland, as well as the appearance of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
  • The atomically updated custom distributions developed by the Fedora project are united into a single family under the Atomic Desktops brand, but the long-standing atomic builds retain the old name. As a result, Fedora Silverblue based on GNOME and Fedora Kinoite based on KDE, as well as Fedora CoreOS and Fedora IoT, retained the same names, but new builds of Fedora Sericea and Fedora Onyx are now distributed under the names Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
  • Updated package versions, 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, Kubernetes 1.29.
  • In the NetworkManager configurator, by default, a mechanism for determining IPv4 address conflicts on the local network (RFC 5227) is enabled, the essence of which is to send a test ARP packet before attaching the address to the network interface (if a response is received, then the address is busy and will not be assigned). For wireless connections, a separate permanent MAC address is assigned (stable-ssid mode in NetworkManager).
  • The Mock (mock-core-configs), Koji, and Copr build tools have been converted to use the DNF 5 package manager to install build dependencies in the chroot environment used when building packages. The distribution itself will be translated to DNF 5 in the next release.
  • In the DNF package manager, loading metadata with lists of files included in packages is disabled by default. Such data is rarely used, but is large in size and slows down work.
  • The package with the OpenSSL 1.1 library has been removed due to the end of support for this branch. OpenSSL 1.1 related dependencies have been switched to OpenSSL 3.0. The python3.7 package has been removed.
  • The Zlib library has been replaced by a fork of Zlib-ng, which is compatible with zlib at the API level, but provides additional optimizations to improve performance.
  • The generation of delta updates of RPM packages has been stopped, allowing only the changed data relative to the already installed version of the package to be loaded during the update. Deltarpm support has been disabled in DNF and DNF5.
  • Added Passim, a caching server for distributing frequently requested files on the local network without directly contacting the main servers and without involving global CDNs.
  • The pam_userdb module has been moved from using BerkeleyDB to GDBM due to the BerkeleyDB 5.x branch being deprecated and the BerkeleyDB 6.x branch being moved to an unacceptable license. Bogofilter has been converted to use SQLite instead of BerkeleyDB (libdb).
  • To build Fedora Workstation Live images, the Image Builder toolkit is used, which supports repeatable builds and offers users an easier process for customizing images.
  • The osbuild toolkit is used to build minimal images for the ARM architecture.
  • To generate Fedora Cloud Edition images, Kiwi tools are used instead of ImageFactory.
  • Packages for Kubernetes have been restructured.
  • Fedora IoT, the edition for Internet of Things devices, has been converted to use boot containers created using the OSTree toolkit and bootc technology.
  • The wget utility has been replaced by wget2, and the iotop utility by iotop-c.
  • Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite editions include bootupd to update the boot loader.
  • The libuser library has been declared obsolete, left unmaintained and no longer used in other Fedora packages (SSSD has long been used in the distribution to support LDAP). The passwd package with the libuser-based implementation of the passwd utility has been removed, instead of which a similar utility from the shadow-utils package is used.
  • Work has been done to prepare for GCC to include a newer version of the C language standard by default, which will mark the end of default support for some legacy language features such as implicit function definition and implicit int assignment.
  • The second stage of the transition to the modernized loading process proposed by Lennart PΓΆttering has been implemented. The differences from the classic boot come down to the use, instead of the initrd image generated on the local system when installing the kernel package, of a unified kernel image UKI (Unified Kernel Image), generated in the distribution infrastructure and digitally signed by the distribution. 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 system environment loaded into memory. When calling a UKI image from UEFI, it is possible to check the integrity and reliability of the digital signature of not only the kernel, but also the contents of the initrd, the authenticity check of which is important, since in this environment the keys for decrypting the root FS are retrieved.

    At the second stage, the ability to directly load UKI from the shim.efi UEFI module without using a separate boot loader (grub, sd-boot) was added, support for using UKI on systems with Aarch64 architecture was implemented, and a version of the UKI image was prepared for cloud environments and protected virtual machines. Prior to this, at the first stage in Fedora 38, support for UKI was added to the bootloader, tools for installing and updating UKI were implemented, and an experimental UKI image was created for booting virtual machines with a limited set of components and drivers.

  • A ready-made package with the PyTorch machine learning framework has been added to the repository, available for installation using the β€œdnf install pytorch” command. Currently, the package only includes components for CPU computing, but in future releases they plan to add support for using GPUs and specialized NPU accelerators.

Additionally, we can note the introduction of β€œfree” and β€œnonfree” repositories of the RPM Fusion project for Fedora 40, in which packages with additional multimedia applications (MPlayer, VLC, Xine), video/audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers are available , game programs and emulators.

Source: opennet.ru