Presented distribution release Fedora Linux 40. For loading prepared products Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOSFedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition and Live builds delivered in the form 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 assemblies Fedora Silverblue delayed.
Most significant changes on Fedora Linux 40:
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- GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation updated up to version 46, which introduced a global search function, improved the performance of the file manager and terminal emulators, added experimental support for the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, improved output quality with fractional scaling, expanded the ability to connect to external services, updated the configurator and improved the notification system . GTK uses a new rendering engine that is based on the Vulkan API.
- Edition with KDE desktop updated before the release of 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 default NetworkManager configurator included mechanism for determining the conflict of IPv4 addresses in the local network (RFC 5227), 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 secured assigning a separate permanent MAC address (stable-ssid mode in NetworkManager).
- Mock (mock-core-configs), Koji and Copr build tools translated to use the DNF 5 package manager to install assembly dependencies in the chroot environment used when building packages. The distribution itself will be translated to DNF 5 in the next release.
- In the package manager DNF is the default disabled loading metadata with lists of files included in packages. 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.
- Discontinued generation of delta updates of RPM packages, which allow loading during update only the changed data relative to the already installed version of the package. 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.
- pam_userdb module transferred 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 transferred to use SQLite instead of BerkeleyDB (libdb).
- To build Fedora Workstation Live images involved Image Builder toolkit, which supports repeatable builds and offers users an easier process for customizing images.
- To build minimal images for ARM architecture involved osbuild toolkit.
- To create Fedora Cloud Edition images instead of ImageFactory tools involved Kiwi.
- Conducted package restructuring for Kubernetes.
- Fedora IoT, edition for Internet of Things devices, translated on usage loading containers formed using tools OSTree and technology bootc.
- The wget utility has been replaced by wget2, and the iotop utility by iotop-c.
- In Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite editions included program bootupdwhich performs a bootloader update.
- Announced the obsolete libuser library, which was left unmaintained and is 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.
- Conducted work to prepare for GCC to include by default a newer version of the C language standard, which will mark the end of default support for some legacy language features such as implicit function definition and implicit int type assignment.
- Implemented second stage switching to the modernized loading process proposed by Lennart Pöttering. 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, verification of the reliability 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 bootloader (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 a machine learning framework has been added to the repository PyTorch, available for installation with the command “dnf install pytorch”. 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, you can note commissioning for Fedora 40 “free” and “nonfree” repositories of the RPM Fusion project, in which packages with additional multimedia applications (MPlayer, VLC, Xine), video/audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers, game programs and emulators are available.
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