F21 Alpha release announcement

Fedora 21 Alpha Release Announcement

The Fedora 21 alpha release has arrived, with a preview of the latest free and open source technology under development. Take a peek inside!

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

What is the Alpha Release?

The Alpha release contains all the exciting features of Fedora 21's products in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 21 is expected in November.

We need your help to make Fedora 21 the best release yet, so please take some time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it – every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora a rock-solid distribution. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as feasible and your feedback will help improve not only Fedora but Linux and free software on the whole. (See the end of this announcement for more information on how to help.)

Fedora.Next and Fedora 21 Products

Fedora 21 marks a departure from the standard "one-size-fits-all" Fedora release. As part of the Fedora.next initiative, Fedora 21 will actually boast three products: cloud, server, and workstation.

Fedora 21 Base

Each of the products will build on the "base" set of packages for Fedora. For instance, each product will use the same packages for the kernel, RPM, Yum, systemd, Anaconda, and so forth.

The Base Working Group develops the standard platform for all Fedora products, which includes the installer, compose tools, and basic platform for the other products. Base is not a full product intended for use on its own, but to be kept as a small, stable platform for other products to build on.

Fedora 21 Cloud

The Fedora Cloud Working Group and Special Interest Group (SIG) has been busy leading up to Fedora 21. Cloud is now a top-level product for Fedora 21, and will include images for use in private cloud environments like OpenStack, as well as AMIs for use on Amazon, and a new image streamlined for running Docker containers.

Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

Space is precious, and there's little reason to include any kernel modules that aren't used in the cloud. As part of the work for Fedora 21, the cloud SIG and kernel team split the kernel into two packages. One package contains the minimum modules for running in a virtualized environment, the other contains the larger set of modules for a more general installation.

Fedora Atomic Host

In early April, Red Hat announced Project Atomic, an effort to provide the tools and patterns for a streamlined operating system to run Docker containers. The Fedora 21 release will be the first to offer an "Atomic" host for Fedora, which includes a minimal set of packages and an image composed with rpm-ostree.

While using the same RPMs as other Fedora offerings, the Atomic host will allow users to roll back updates (if necessary) as one atomic unit -- making update management much easier.

For users and organizations looking to run Docker containers, the Atomic host will be ideal.

Fedora 21 Server

The Fedora Server product is a common base platform that is meant to run featured application stacks, which are produced, tested, and distributed by the Server Working Group. Want to use Fedora as a Web server, file server, database server, or platform for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service? Fedora 21 Server is for you.

Domain Controller Server Role

As part of the server role offerings available for Fedora 21, the server product ships with a role deployment mechanism. One of the roles offered in 21 is the Domain Controller Service.

The Domain Controller Service packages up the freeIPA integrated Identity and Authentication solution for Linux/UNIX networked environments. A FreeIPA server provides centralized authentication, authorization and account information by storing data about user, groups, hosts and other objects necessary to manage the security aspects of a network of computers.

Release Schedule

The full release schedule is available on the Fedora wiki. The current schedule calls for a beta release in mid-October, and a final release in mid-November.

These dates are subject to change, pending any major bugs or issues found during the development process.

Note on performance

Fedora development releases use a kernel with extra debug information to help us understand and resolve issues faster; however, this can have a significant impact on performance. Refer to the kernel debug strategy for more details. You can boot with slub_debug=- or use the kernel from nodebug repository to disable the extra debug info.