A Number Of Fedora 21 Features Were Just Approved

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved a batch of new features for Fedora 21 with its much anticipated debut in Q4'2014.

As reported on Phoronix last week, Fedora 21 is aiming for a mid-October release. The schedule that was firmed up today is that it will be released "no earlier than" 14 October while a Fedora 21 Beta is planned no earlier than 9 September and the 100% completion deadline for new features is no earlier than 26 August. The actual dates will be firmed up more after the F21 change submission deadline on 8 April, plus Fedora Linux releases have a long history of their releases getting delayed, but we will see if that improves with the latest Fedora restructuring that's been ongoing for this Red Hat sponsored distribution.

Among the Fedora 21 changes that were approved at today's FESCo meeting for Fedora 21 features include:

- Migrating cron jobs to native systemd timer units and changing Fedora package dependencies that currently depend on crontab.

- A system-wide crypto policy of unifying cryptography policies by different applications/libraries so there is a consistent security level for all applications running on a Fedora system.

- Access control for PC/SC smart cards to prevent unauthorized access to data on smart cards and also from unauthorized erasing of smart cards or even communicating with the smart card's firmware.

- Dropping python-setuptools-devel.

- Ruby 2.1 will be added to Fedora 21. Ruby 2.1 features improvements in speed, memory efficiency, and other new features.

- Lohit Odia Gurmukhi fonts will be renamed.

- OpenCL support as a self-contained change has been accepted. I have previously written on Phoronix how Fedora 21 is aiming for great open-source OpenCL support with enabling the OpenCL/Clover state tracker within Mesa by default, shipping POCL for OpenCL support on CPUs, and packaging other OpenCL-related open-source Linux codes.

- Allwinner Sunxi ARM SoC support in the official Fedora ARM world for the low-cost Allwinner A10 / A13 / A20 SoCs has been deferred until a later FESCo meeting. The aim is to support Allwinner SoCs via the kernel in Fedora ARM images without having to do a Fedora Remix.

Other Fedora 21 features on the look out for in Fedora 21 will be the X.Org Server not running as root in more scenarios, DNF improvements (but don't look for it to replace yum until at least Fedora 22), possible use of Hawkey by default, GNOME 3.14, continued Wayland porting and improvements, and removal of older GPU support (in particular, non-KMS GPU drivers currently shipped by Fedora).

Overall, Fedora 21 is shaping up to be a very exciting release! Stay tuned for more Fedora 21 news and testing in the weeks and months ahead on Phoronix.