Fedora 21 Likely Switching To Hawkey Package Management

With Fedora 20 out the door, the latest feature to talk about for Fedora 21 is that they will be switching over to the Hawkey package management library.

Hawkey is a new package management library built atop the libsolv library and its work within the Fedora world dates back to Fedora 18.

Hawkey handles querying and resolving of RPM dependencies and information via RPMDB and Yum repositories. The Hawkey API tries to be better than the Yum API while delivering greater performance.

Hawkey is also critical to the next-generation DNF package manager over Yum. Most recently, a Hawkey back-end for PackageKit has been under development.

Richard Hughes has been workig on a Hawkey back-end for Fedora 20 for the past month and a half and he nailed a lot of bugs in Hawkey, librepo, and libsolv. With the improved packages, Hughes noted on his blog, "I am now happy we can switch Fedora 21 to using hawkey by default, and reap the rewards of all the hard work put in by so many people over the last few months. I for one am really happy about the speed boost brought to all the applications using PackageKit." Thanks to Phoronix reader Eric Griffith for pointing out this post.

Fedora 21 should also be exciting for greater OpenCL support, it modernizes the GPU driver requirements, and will feature much more mature Wayland support than what's found right now in Fedora 20 as an early tech preview.