Fedora 20 Gets A Bunch Of Features Proposed

In the past few days there have been a number of proposals for new features in Fedora 20, some more exciting than others. Here's a look at the Fedora 20 proposals to date.

The Fedora 20 proposals still need to clear the approval of the Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee along with any other developer concerns, but most of them will likely do so, and the proposals include:

- Ryu Network Operating System. Ryu is an OS for software-defined networking and would bring an open-source openflow controller to the Fedora world to benefit its support for OpenStack and Open vSwitch.

- Glibc 2.18. The latest version of glibc should be found in Fedora 20.

- ARM As A Primary Architecture. Fedora 20 will hopefully put ARM on the same stage as x86!

- Application Installer. Fedora 20 might replace the GNOME PackageKit front-ends with a new application. This new tool may be called GNOME-Software and is about installing applications rather than just packages. It will be more comparable to the Ubuntu Software Center rather than just a package manager.

- Hadoop. Apache's Hadoop might find its way into the Fedora 20 package repository.

- Shared Certificate Tools. These would be Fedora tools for adding/removing shared trusted certificates along with blacklisting certificates.

- SDDM for KDE. The SDDM display manager might become the default KDE desktop manager rather than KDM. This is happening since KDE's KDM is nearly end of life while SDDM is modern and supports C++11 and Qt5 and has a host of better features than KDM.

- KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11. This is a no brainer, but KDE 4.11 should find its way into the Fedora 20 package repository.

- Kdump for Secure Boot. Right now the Linux kernel kdump support is disabled when using Secure Boot, but Fedora developers are looking to offer the support on Fedora 20. The problem with kdump and Secure Boot comes down to unsigned code running at privilege level zero.

- Yesod Web Framework. The Haskell Yesod web framework might be added to the Fedora 20 package repository.

- ARM virtualization on x86. This feature comes down to adding ARM on x86 support to libvirt and virt-manager. QEMU already has an ARM emulator that works well, but there's improvements to be made in the virt-manager and libvirt components for better supporting ARM emulation when running on x86 hardware.

- Virt Manager Snapshots. There's already support for creating virtualization snapshots on the open-source Linux stack, but there isn't yet an easy graphical user-interface for creating and managing virtual disk snapshots from virt-manager. This feature proposal seeks to address that shortcoming, which will make it more competitive with VirtualBox and VMware with being easier to use.

Stay tuned for more details on Fedora 20 development at Phoronix over the next few months. Right now the plan is to release Fedora 20 around the middle of November.