From the ‘Linux Miracle’ files:
The first alpha milestone of the Fedora Linux 17 release is now available.
This is the release that is known as the Beefy Miracle and it’s not just a marketing message, it’s also a statement about how much ‘beef’ has been packed into this release.
“When we said Beefy, we weren’t kidding: an a-bun-dance of condiments, err, features, are available to help you feed your hunger for the best in free and open source software,” Fedora developer, Dennis Gilmore wrote in the release announcement. “We take pride in our toppings, and in our fine ingredients; Fedora 17 includes both over- and under-the-bun improvements that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free (range) software.”
On the server side Corosync 2.0 is included as is the Pacemaker cluster resource manager. I personally had not been using those project, but now that they’re part of Fedora 17, I will be trying them out for clustered load-balancing testing.
On the virtualization front, Fedora is including Open vSwitch which is a virtual switch project that plays a critical role in the OpenStack Quantum networking module. OpenStack is an open stack cloud effort that Red Hat has some involvement with and the embrace of Open vSwitch in Fedora is a huge step in my opinion. It means that the Fedora community will get to test out and use this virtual switch making the path to OpenStack Quantum for Fedora users, relatively easy. OpenStack Essex (the upcoming release) is also set for inclusion in Fedora 17 as is the full Quantum stack.
Security is another strong theme in the Beefy Miracle with support for DNSSEC on workstations. That’s right DNS Security comes to end users (and it’s about freaking time too.) A new unified Firewall service called firewalld also is including, which will replace iptables with a more modern firewall architecture.
Topping off the Beefy Miracle is a massive scalability boost to the EXT4 filesystem to beyond 16 TB. That’s right, Red Hat’s ‘hobbyist’ Linux distro can scale.
And that’s just the stuff that interests me as a longtime Fedora user after a quick download – there is lots more to like in this release that I’ll dig into in the days/weeks ahead.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
