Another Week, Another Round Of Fedora 17 Features

At this week's Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, another round of features were approved for the Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) release.

The last few Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) have seen a large number of features being approved for this next Fedora Linux release due out in May. This Monday's meeting wasn't any different with many more features being officially approved for this next Red-Hat-sponsored distribution. Below is a listing of the items that were just approved this week.

- A re-worked Fedora 17 LiveCD.

- CUPS colord support to basically provide ICC profile support for printing.

- Cloudstack integration within Fedora as a "mature, enterprise-grade, fault tolerant, multi-hyerpvisor, production-ready IaaS platform."

- An updated cluster stack with enhanced fail-over support.

- Support for the Eucalyptus cloud computing platform.

- JBoss Application Server 7 support as a Java EE application server.

- Better support within NetworkManager for hot-spots. This comes down to being an easy-to-use AP-mode for supported hardware for Internet connection sharing via WiFi.

- XAPI / the Xen API tool-stack will be integrated into Fedora 17 for those using Xen virtualization.

- Open vSwitch support, which is a flexible, multi-layer software network switch.

- Enterprise-oriented networking enhancements to NetworkManager. Among the enterprise features to be worked on are bonding, IP-over-Infiniband, VLAN, and bridging.

- Improved power management for user-space software.

- OpenStack in Fedora 17 will be upgraded to the "Essex" release.

- Support to virtualize a performance monitoring unit (PMU) for KVM guest's use.

- Live block migration support for KVM guests.

- Thin client provisioning improvements within KVM.

- Fedora 17 Python code will be statically analyzed for reference-counting errors.

- Network zones support to classify network connections based upon their trust levels (e.g. public WiFi networks being untrusted compared to a home network).

- Firewalld will become the default firewall solution in Fedora 17. The firewalld package was introduced into Fedora 15, but with Fedora 17 it's expected to be the default network firewall solution.

- Darkserver as a service to help find details of build-ids will be part of Fedora 17.

Hopefully all of the features will come to fruition for this release cycle. That about covers up this week's FESCo meeting in the Fedora camp. The meeting minutes for this week can be found in this text file. These latest features come after last week's features, the week before that, etc. Fedora 17 is really shaping up to be a "beefy" release and hopefully it will be a miracle. The official release is expected for early May while it will go into an alpha state towards the end of February or early March. The feature freeze for Fedora 17 will go into affect next week.