Fedora 19 Feature Talk: Cloud, Java 8, Yum, Syslinux

Another round of features for Fedora 19 have been proposed.

Feature talk for Fedora 19 already covered on Phoronix includes Fedora Looks To Replace MySQL With MariaDB, BIND10, GCC 4.8, E17, Etc, More Fedora 19 Features Are Proposed, and firstly Possible Fedora 19 Features Are Published.

The latest proposals include:

First-Class Cloud Images - Right now Fedora is offered on Amazon's EC2 cloud, but this feature proposal is to overhaul the cloud image production. There's a desire to have cloud images made for EC2 and the other popular cloud platforms, but just not for the final release. Cloud images would now also come for the alpha and beta process too -- perhaps even daily/weekly image builds of Rawhide. Aside from EC2, other clouds being looked at are OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus.

Fedora Upgrade Using Yum - Prior to Fedora 17 it was possible to use Anaconda Upgrade and PreUpgrade for moving to the next Fedora Linux release while on more recent releases there is just the FedUp utility. The new proposal is to have FedUp and FedoraUpgrade for Fedora 19. FedUp uses yum-upgrade but in dracut environment, which is an offline upgrade. The desire is to have online upgrades of Fedora using yum.

Syslinux - Syslinux might become an option as an alternative boot-loader for Fedora 19 instead of GRUB2.

KScreen - KDE screen management is to now be handled by the new KScreen implementation.

Java 8 - OpenJDK 8 will likely be packaged as a "technology preview" for Fedora 19.

Ryu - "Ryu is an Operating System for Software Defined Networking."

Shared System Certificates - "Make NSS, GnuTLS, OpenSSL and Java share a default source for retrieving system certificate anchors and black list information. This is an initial but useful step in the direction of a comprehensive solution."

Guile 2.0 - They plan to have Guile 2.0 packaged for Fedora 19 while having a compatibility package for Guile 1.8 transitioning.

Ns-3 - The Ns-3 network simulator might make its way to Fedora 19.

SSSD improve AD integration - "The next major release of SSSD will include support for more advanced AD features for domain members. This includes site support and trusted domains."

FreeIPA v3 Trust Improvements - "Multiple Domain Controllers and multiple additional DNS domains managed by FreeIPA can now be accessible via trusting relationship by Active Directory domain members. Additionally, Global Catalog service is provided for use by AD clients, allowing FreeIPA users to be included into access-control lists of AD resources."

Scratch - Scratch is an open-source educational programming environment that might find its way into the package repository for Fedora 19.

OpenStack Grizzly - The next major release of OpenStack, codenamed "Grizzly", should be found in Fedora 19.

Checkpoint/Restore - "Add support to checkpoint and restore processes. Checkpointing processes can be used for fault tolerance and/or load balancing."

systemd/udev Predictable Network Interface Names - "The udevd service has a long history of providing predicatable names for block devices and others. For Fedora 19 we'd like to provide the same for network interfaces, following a similar naming scheme, but only as fallback if not other solution such as biosdevname is installed or the administrator manually defined network interface names via udev rules or the old network scripts."

Fedora 19 is tentatively planned for release in May, assuming it doesn't end up getting delayed for months like the painful cycle of Fedora 18. The quality of Fedora 19 hopefully won't end up being a mess like the Fedora 18 disaster.