Fedora 40 Cleared To Ship AMD ROCm 6, Packages May Reintroduce KDE X11 Support

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February.

Voted and approved on within the FESCo tickets ahead of their weekly meeting were the following changes for this week:

- A new tool for Fedora IoT called "Simplified Provisioning" that makes it easier to deploy and configure the Fedora Internet of Things (IoT) edition.

- Fedora IoT will now be built using the RPM-OSTree unified core.

- Fedora IoT is also now cleared to ship a Fedora IoT Bootable Container for edge and IoT use-cases.

- IBUS 1.5.30 is approved for Fedora 40 along with ibus-anthy 1.5.16.

- Replacing iotop with the iotop-c implementation.

- Packaging its own PyTorch rather than relying on PIP.

- Packaging up AMD's ROCm 6 compute stack. Fedora previously worked on packaging up the ROCm compute packages to make it easier to deploy while this approval is on moving to the new ROCm 6.0 base.

- Using bpfman for managing BPF eBPF programs.

- As for the recent debate around Fedora 40 dropping KDE X11 by default, FESCo has offered their latest guidance. At the meeting they decided that KDE packages may reintroduce support for X11 are allowed in the main Fedora repositories but that they must not be included by default for any release-blocking deliverables like the ISO/image, etc. Upgrades from Fedora 38 and Fedora 39 to Fedora 40 will also switch to Wayland by default for the KDE Plasma Wayland session.

More details on this week's FESco rulings can be found via the Fedora mailing list.