Fedora 36 Establishing ELN-Extras, Fedora 37 To Retire ARMv7

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year.

Arguably most interesting from the latest batch of approved changes is Fedora 36 establishing ELN-Extras. ELN as "Enterprise Linux Next" continues going strong with the various Fedora / Red Hat / CentOS organizational changes. ELN-Extras now is a new build target similar to ELN but closer in function to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). ELN-Extras will be the target for preparing and maintaining packages that are planned for EPEL N+1 while ELN is still targeting RHEL N+1.

The description of the ELN-Extras effort is summed up as, "This will essentially be an extension of Fedora ELN, with the primary difference being that the content in ELN-Extras will be defined by the Fedora/EPEL community, while ELN's content is largely decided upon by Red Hat management. This will offer users the opportunity to make sure their applications will work on upcoming releases of RHEL as well as providing a bootstrapping mechanism for EPEL. It will be far easier and quicker to get a compose of EPEL N+1 out the door if the initial packages have already been built for ELN-Extras."

Also approved for Fedora 36 this spring is showing unit names in systemd messages and removing the wire extensions support. The legacy wireless extensions interface was replaced by the "new" mac80211/cfg80211 interface well more than a decade ago. The legacy support has long been deprecated and now finally being removed.

Meanwhile approved for Fedora 37 is retiring the ARMv7 architecture support. ARMv8 has been around for a decade already and this will eliminate the last full 32-bit CPU architecture supported by Fedora (some 32-bit x86 packages continue to be built for use on x86_64).

Farewell ARMv7!

More details on the latest batch of approved Fedora feature changes via this mailing list post.