Fedora 20 talking points

DRAFT
This is a draft only for discussion. This is not a final set of talking points.

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 20 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release, and to help drive content for the release, etc.

The talking points are based in part on the Change Set for this release.

Themes for the Release

What's the overall "theme" or set of themes for the Fedora 20 release? The Fedora 20 release happens to coincide (roughly) with 10 years of Fedora. After a decade of development, the Fedora 20 release represents the evolution of the project so far and the features that are emphasized in this release say something about the priorities of this community after all that time.

So what are the themes for this Fedora release? If you look over the ChangeSet for F20, it may be a bit opaque to the outside observer what the release actually "means."

ARM as a Primary Architecture

While Fedora has supported a number of hardware architectures over the years, x86/x86_64 has been the default for the majority of Fedora users and for the Linux community in general.

ARM, however, has been making massive strides. It already dominates the mobile market, and is becoming a go-to platform for hobbyists and makers, and is showing enormous promise for the server market as well.

In keeping with Fedora's commitment to innovation, the Fedora community has been pushing to make ARM a primary architecture to satisfy the needs of users and developers targeting the ARM platform.

Cloud and Virtualization Improvements

The Fedora 20 release continues the Fedora tradition of adopting and integrating leading edge technologies used in cloud computing. This release includes a number of features that will make working with virtualization and cloud computing much easier.

OS Installer Support for LVM Thin Provisioning

OS Installer Support for LVM Thin Provisioning

LVM has introduced thin provisioning technology, which provides greatly improved snapshot functionality in addition to thin provisioning capability. This change will make it possible to configure thin provisioning during OS installation.

Vagrant Support

Vagrant Support

Vagrant is an automation tool used to manage development environments using virtualization and configuration management tools. It allows developers and teams to work on their projects and test them in an environment similar to production. Historically, Vagrant had a dependency on VirtualBox, but the newer versions have a plugin system allowing it to work with other virtualization technologies, including KVM.

Role based access control with libvirt

Changes/Virt_ACLs

Libvirt role based access control will allow fine grained access control like 'user FOO can only start/stop/pause vm BAR', but for all libvirt APIs and objects.

ARM on x86 with libvirt/virt-manager

Changes/Virt_ARM_on_x86

Fix running ARM VMs on x86 hosts using standard libvirt tools libvirt virsh, virt-manager and virt-install.

Developer Goodness

Snapshot and Rollback Tool

Snapshot and Rollback Tool

With the advent of thinly-provisioned LVM pools, it has become possible for us to implement full-system LVM snapshotting for recording rollback points. We are planning to support this for yum updates and eventually fedup upgrades going forwards. This change request notes the addition of new tools provided by the roller-derby project to present an interface and a CLI for managing and initiating rollbacks.