Fedora 10 Prepares For Development Freeze

Fedora releases always include the latest and greatest features on the X.Org front and Fedora 10 is no different. Fedora 9 was the first distribution shipping with experimental kernel-based mode-setting support and this support is further stabilized in Cambridge. At the beginning of the month we shared The State of Kernel Mode-Setting. In that article we shared where kernel mode-setting was at along with provided a few videos of kernel mode-setting in action on the Fedora 10 Beta. Officially, kernel mode-setting (KMS) has yet to enter the mainline Linux kernel and it will not be until at least Linux 2.6.29 when this happens.

One of the underlying features to Fedora 10 is the introduction of Plymouth, which is their replacement for the aging Red Hat Graphical Boot (RHGB) project. Plymouth relies upon kernel mode-setting in order to provide a smooth and clean start-up experience. In Fedora 10 Beta there still was a rough edge between Plymouth ending and the GNOME Display Manager ending, but that has been cleared up in Fedora Rawhide. Below is a video showing Plymouth and its tighter integration with the GDM when using ATI graphics.

Fedora 10 is also shipping with libdrm 2.4.0, the GEM-bearing xf86-video-intel 2.5 driver, and all of the other latest drivers. A Fedora 10 Preview Release is scheduled to come out on the 4th of November while the final release is set for November 25.