Fedora 12 Picks Up Another Batch Of Features

Going back to May before the release of Fedora 11, features that were planned for Fedora 12 (the release that's codenamed Constantine) began to get laid out. Among these features were LVM enhancements, replacing nash/mkinitrd with Dracut, and using Empathy as the default instant messaging program. With time more features have come about for Fedora 12, such as re-basing the desktop environments to KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, updating the kernel, etc. Over the weekend though, the Fedora Project Wiki was updated to reflect a whole batch of new features that are now planned for Fedora 12. Below are some of these new features.

- Support for clustered Samba over GFS2.
- Add liblvm, a user-space library for application interface to LVM.
- Lower process capabilities.
- Further enhance the mobile broadband support in NetworkManager.
- Add Fedora support to the Moblin environment.
- Improve Fedora 12 power management.
- Add the PackageKit browser plug-in.
- A new and improved version of SystemTap.
- Improved language pack installation support in Yum.

There are also many new KVM / virtualization related features that were just approved for Fedora 12:

- Allow KVM guest virtual machines to share identical memory pages.
- Enable KVM guests to use huge page backed memory in order to reduce memory consumption and improve performance.
- Allow guest virtual machines to be presented with the same ABI across QEMU upgrades.
- Add oVirt Node.
- Improved virtualization security.
- Enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage.

All of the virtualization improvements in Fedora 12 are great to see, albeit it's not much of a surprise since Red Hat has largely been leading on the virtualization front and earlier releases of Fedora were first to introduce libvirt and virt-manager. Beyond just the virtualiation changes, seeing improved power management, Moblin support, and further improvements to NetworkManager are also welcoming.

The list of all of the features currently targeted for Fedora 12 along with their individual statuses are available from the Fedora Wiki. The first development release, Fedora 12 Alpha, is planned for availability on the 18th of August.