Fedora 17 gets Eucalyptus, OpenStack and hotspot support

The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) met yesterday and approved a selection of new features for Fedora 17, which has a planned release date in early May. When migrating KVM guest systems on a live system, for example, the distribution will now also be able to migrate guest system disk images to the new host system. This feature, known as live block migration, is important for virtualisation and is also likely within the next year to find its way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which regularly adopts enhancements following field testing in Fedora.

The Fedora committee has also adopted two further KVM-related features in the form of improvements to thin provisioning and support for performance monitoring on guest systems. Further cloud technologies, in the shape of IaaS application Cloudstack and cloud infrastructure platform Eucalyptus, have also been added. Although it is still under development, some Red Hat developers have also undertaken to integrate all of the components of the Essex release of OpenStack.

A number of new features of interest to everyday users were also accepted, including support for colour management using colord in CUPS, improved power management, extended hotspot support in NetworkManager, and the use of firewall daemon firewalld, which can be configured via D-BUS. Last week, the Fedora committee also gave developers the green light to push ahead with support for ext4 drives larger than 16 TB and to update Ruby to version 1.9.3.

The deadline for submitting major changes for Fedora 17 has now closed, so that, with perhaps one or two exceptions, the new feature list is unlikely to be extended once the 19 changes approved yesterday have been added to it. The list has grown steadily over the last few months and includes features such as using btrfs as the default filesystem, using GCC 4.7, and multitouch support in X Server. Some of these features may yet be put back to a later version if they are not ready on time. Btrfs will, for example, only become the default filesystem if a tool for testing btrfs filesystems is available by the feature freeze deadline in mid-March. An alpha version of Fedora 17 is scheduled for release in late February, with a beta to follow in early April.

See also:

• Fedora relocates operating system under /usr/, a report from The H.
• Fedora 17 to come with Gimp 2.8, KDE 4.8, oVirt and GCC 4.7, a report from The H.

(djwm)