01:00:15 <nirik> #startmeeting Fedora 12 Features Overview Class 01:00:15 <zodbot> Meeting started Tue Sep 29 01:00:15 2009 UTC. The chair is nirik. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 01:00:15 <zodbot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #halp #info #idea #link #topic. 01:00:20 <nirik> #topic intro 01:00:38 <nirik> welcome everyone to another Fedora classroom session. 01:01:25 <nirik> Feel free to chime in with questions or the like as you think of them. I will try and answer them then or point to later in the session or the q&a at the end for answering them. 01:01:44 <nirik> Tonight I am going to go over the proposed features for the upcoming Fedora 12 release. 01:02:03 <nirik> There are a lot of them, so I won't spend too much time on any one unless their are questions on them. 01:02:28 <nirik> Anyone have any questions on the general setup or topic? Or shall I start in? 01:02:49 <ciupicri> nirik, I have one about the new bridging settings 01:03:08 <zcat> I was curious if any notable new packages were able to be added to f12 due to having a bit more space from the new rpm lzma compression 01:03:49 <nirik> well, those are specific to some features... can we address them as we come to those features? 01:04:09 <ciupicri> ok 01:04:29 <nirik> #topic General overview of Features 01:04:59 <nirik> First a quick overview. Features are fedora's way of noting something that requires a lot of work or coordination. 01:05:34 <nirik> The current set of f12 features are proposed, but could still be dropped if they don't end up fully landed and working before Beta. Or after that if some show stopper comes up. 01:05:53 <nirik> Sometimes a feature doesn't end up landing in time, and becomes a feature for the next release. 01:06:23 <nirik> You can find general info on features at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy 01:06:35 <nirik> That said, lets dive into the exciting list for F12. ;) 01:06:56 <nirik> The full list is at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList 01:07:14 <nirik> #topic Abrt 01:07:23 <nirik> How many folks here have heard of bug buddy? 01:08:17 * fenris02 01:08:19 * nirik realizes the channel became invite only. :( Sorry about that. 01:08:19 <BounceCat> +1 01:08:28 <ciupicri> isn't it a gnome/gtk application that runs when an application crashes? 01:08:35 <fenris02> abrt 01:08:49 <nirik> exactly. 01:08:57 <nirik> Abrt is a more general setup of the same thing. 01:09:04 <zcat> sortof worked in the last spin, but couldn't lookup bugzilla.redhat.com. almost there... 01:09:15 <nirik> It can detect when a application has crashed, a kernel has oopsed and the like. 01:09:22 <nirik> and report a bug on it with a traceback. 01:09:50 <nirik> Yeah, it's better this time around. The main thing I see it lacking now is that it doesn't install debuginfo, so some of it's traces are not too usefull. 01:10:22 <nirik> but it's a nice tool, with a lot of good potential. 01:10:53 <nirik> any general questions on abrt? You can look at it's feature page for more info. 01:11:17 <nirik> #topic Dracut 01:11:47 <nirik> I'm going to skip down to dracut... there are a few features between, but not sure how much they matter to most people. ;) 01:12:14 <nirik> Dracut is a new replacement for mkinitrd. It's written a lot more coherently and has a number of nice features. 01:12:41 <nirik> so, this will be the thing that generates your initrd in f12... 01:13:01 <nirik> it's got debugging and ability to run a shell along with all the other things initrds do for you. 01:13:02 <brunowolff> Renamed initramfs. 01:13:12 <fenris02> not really. it's quite different 01:13:40 <nirik> well, yes, it writes out initramfs files instead of initrd, but same principal. ;) 01:13:52 <zcat> does it still looking at /etc/fstab for hints about what modules it needs to cram in for root & swap? 01:14:21 <nirik> zcat: not sure, but by default it makes much larger files. It basically adds in anything it can think of. This means your install should boot/work on a variety of machines... 01:14:34 <nirik> on the downside it means that /boot gets filled up much quicker. 01:14:42 <brunowolff> It is supposed to be able to build generic ones that work on most systems. 01:14:59 <zcat> shotgun approach? ala a livecd with lots of modules? 01:15:04 <brunowolff> For a while the initramfs image was being built when the rpm was created. 01:15:26 <brunowolff> But gpl concerns had the developers switch back to post install builds. 01:15:32 <nirik> yeah. So here at least, dracut makes about 12MB initramfs files, while initrds were about 3MB 01:15:54 <zcat> hah. that might be a problem on my netbook. 50M /boot 01:15:58 <nirik> brunowolff: yep. So it will build the initramfs on new kernel installs for example. 01:16:05 <nirik> zcat: yep. It could be. 01:16:39 <nirik> ok, anything else on dracut off hand? 01:16:42 <fenris02> zcat, you still only retain 3 kernels right? 01:16:53 <ciupicri> nirik, but can't dracut be setup to use only the needed modules? 01:17:12 <ciupicri> nirik, to make the files smaller 01:17:13 <nirik> ciupicri: I'm not sure. It doesn't do that by default, but it may have a way to. 01:17:32 <nirik> yes, it looks like it does... 01:17:40 <nirik> -H, --hostonly Host-Only mode: Install only what is needed for 01:17:40 <nirik> booting the local host instead of a generic host. 01:17:41 <brunowolff> There are some rpms named such that I think you can cut out some things. 01:18:05 <fenris02> nirik, is there a sysconfig/ setting for hostonly vs. generic by chance? 01:18:34 <nirik> doesn't seem to be currently, but that would be a good enhancement 01:18:54 <nirik> ah, there is a /etc/dracut.conf you can change. 01:18:55 <ciupicri> I guess zcat should report a RFE then :-) 01:19:37 <nirik> hopefully this will end up being much more maintainable than mkinitrd was (since that was cobbled together over years) 01:19:54 <zcat> fenris02, (yes, and with 3 kernels, i'm using 29M of 49M, with 18M left. which means if the initrds were 12M*3 (vs 4*3) it would put me over. i'd need 2 kernels, or a larger /boot for f12) 01:20:08 <nirik> ok, anything further on dracut? 01:20:33 <ciupicri> going once, going twice... 01:20:36 <nirik> #topic Empathy 01:20:40 <brunowolff> In rawhide there is currently some bad interaction between dracut and mdadm. So if your using raid and want to try rawhide 01:20:49 <brunowolff> you may need to fallback to mkinitrd. 01:21:01 <nirik> ok, once again Empathy is going to try and land as the default IM setup... currently pidgin is used. 01:21:19 <nirik> I haven't used Empathy much, but it's more modular and has a lot of nice features. 01:21:34 <nirik> brunowolff: I thought that was fixed now? not 100% sure however. 01:22:09 <brunowolff> One bug got fixed, but there is another problem that's weird. 01:22:23 <nirik> you can of course keep using pidgin, but empathy will be default for new installs. 01:22:50 <nirik> ok, moving along... 01:22:52 <ciupicri> nirik, is Empathy compatible with the pidgin logs? 01:23:04 <nirik> ciupicri: nope. I don't think so... it has it's own. 01:23:08 <brunowolff> bug 523862 01:24:14 <nirik> #topic New Gnome (2.28), New KDE (4.3) 01:24:33 <nirik> Of course with a new fedora comes new versions of Desktops... new gnome and kde will be in f12. 01:25:32 <nirik> http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.28/ 01:26:12 <nirik> There will be a preview of the new Gnome Shell as well for folks that want to try it out. 01:26:58 <nirik> note to try out gnome-shell you will need 3d/direct rendering. 01:27:19 <nirik> On the KDE side, release notes at: http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.3.1.php 01:27:44 <nirik> lots of good bugfixes and such in both. 01:28:10 <nirik> ok, anything on the updated desktops? Or shall I move on? 01:28:48 <nirik> #topic Pile of libvirt/kvm features for f12 01:29:02 <nirik> There are a number of features related to libvirt/kvm upcoming... 01:29:08 <nirik> You can see the list at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F12_Virt_Features 01:29:48 <nirik> KSM - sharing memory pages that are common to guests. This will reduce the memory your host needs for a bunch of similar guests. 01:30:08 <nirik> KVM Huge Page Backed Memory - This will improve performance by allowing Large memory pages for guests. 01:30:34 <nirik> KVM NIC Hotplug - Add new network interfaces on the fly and have the guest use them as they appear. 01:31:11 <nirik> KVM Stable Guest ABI - This is mostly needed for other OSes like windows. The guests won't change on new libvirt/kvm updates, so you don't need to re-register windows or change device drivers if you don't want to. 01:31:47 <nirik> KVM qcow2 Performance - This allows the better qcow2 image format to have better performance. (I have seen some issues with this, but it's a great idea) 01:32:10 <nirik> Network Interface Management - the netcf interface for networks, allowing libvirt to manage/setup/change networks 01:32:37 <nirik> VirtPrivileges - kvm guests run as 'qemu' user and are confined by svirt as well... 01:33:02 <nirik> VirtTCK - a test suite for all the libvirt features. 01:33:22 <nirik> VirtgPXE - allow guests to boot via gPXE (ie, pxeboot from kernel.org! :) 01:33:37 <nirik> VirtStorageManagement - increase storage management setups. 01:33:56 <nirik> libguestfs - allows you to manipulate guest images from the host directly. 01:34:05 <nirik> whew. :) 01:34:21 <nirik> Lots of very cool stuff from the libvirt guys. 01:35:16 <nirik> ok, moving along... 01:35:21 <nirik> #topic Lower Process Capabilities 01:35:41 <nirik> This is a nice feature to reduce the privs that binaries and files need/have. 01:35:54 <nirik> I'm not sure how far this has gotten, but some subset of it was going to land... 01:36:07 <nirik> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/LowerProcessCapabilities for more info 01:36:12 <fenris02> it's source code changes 01:36:13 <cuga_> do binaries have to be updated to take advantage of this or is it transparent? 01:36:15 <fenris02> takes a while 01:36:20 <cuga_> ah, answers my question 01:36:52 <nirik> yeah, it needs changes in the applications... 01:37:11 <nirik> it's a nice layer of additional security... 01:37:35 <nirik> #topic NetworkManager improvements 01:37:44 <nirik> There are several NM enhancement features... 01:38:02 <nirik> Mobile Broadband Enhancements - lots of new features for mobile broadband. 01:38:13 <nirik> NetworkManagerIPv6 - ipv6 support. 01:38:30 <nirik> NetworkManager System Connections - improve system connections 01:39:25 <nirik> All good stuff. Will be nice to get signal strength and such from the broadband cards. 01:40:09 <raylu> "system connections"? 01:40:24 <nirik> raylu: yeah, so you can tell it to bring up a wireless network before anyone logs in 01:40:37 <raylu> ah. useful 01:40:49 <nirik> or otherwise define connections that should be available for all users. 01:40:58 <raylu> you said "improve." is this functionality in the NM in F11? 01:41:15 <nirik> raylu: it is, but I don't think it's enabled by default... it wasn't quite ready in f11. 01:42:05 <nirik> #topic PackageKit features 01:42:12 <nirik> There are a few packagekit features as well. 01:42:37 <nirik> PackageKitBrowserPlugin - allows a web site to ask the user to install some package from the repos. 01:43:08 <nirik> PackageKitCommandNotFound - a plugin that will ask if you want to install some command you tried to run that was not installed. 01:43:53 <nirik> The second one is going to be pretty noticable... I suspect the first won't get much use. ;) 01:44:20 <nirik> #topic Rakudo Perl 6 01:44:22 <zcat> yeah, i suspect that NotFound plugin may end up being one of those loveit/hateit new features. if you typo at the cmdline, and there's no yum cache (or a stale one), you must wait (or keep hitting ctrl-c) 01:44:43 <nirik> F12 will include a perl6 compiler/package for folks that want to play with that. 01:44:53 <nirik> zcat: yeah, agreed. 01:45:16 <nirik> #topic Thusnelda 01:45:31 <nirik> New shiny version of libtheora 01:45:48 <nirik> It was featured on /. in the last few days. Lots of improvements over the old version. 01:45:48 <fenris02> openvideo support? 01:46:39 <nirik> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Thusnelda has all the features. 01:46:47 <nirik> I thought openvideo was a browser feature? 01:47:21 <nirik> better quality, faster. ;) 01:47:40 <nirik> #topic XI2 01:48:02 <nirik> New xinput layer. This will allow the simultaneous use of multiple independent input devices. 01:48:19 <nirik> Very handy for multihead, which I hope will be possible again/usefull 01:48:32 <fenris02> mouse + touchpad ? 01:48:44 <fenris02> with two mouse pointers? 01:48:47 <nirik> fenris02: or 3 mice, or 4 keyboards, or whatever 01:49:19 <nirik> you can do multiple 'master' devices or multiple 'slaves' 01:49:36 <nirik> so 2 keyboards that are both slaves and input the same, just at the same time. 01:49:57 <nirik> or 2 keyboards that are master and can type into two different windows at the same time a different stream. 01:50:30 <nirik> lots of nice possibilities. 01:50:45 <nirik> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XI2 for more info. 01:51:13 <nirik> #topic XZ Rpm Payloads 01:51:26 <nirik> rpms are now compressed with XZ compression. 01:51:53 <nirik> The only downsides are: you need a rpm that understands xz to unpack them. ;) 01:52:22 <nirik> and they have caused delta rpms to be painfull. Hopefully they have been tweaked to avoid that now. 01:52:41 <zcat> how much space was freed for new/more packages? 01:53:05 <nirik> zcat: I'm not sure. This would only affect the dvd media... and not sure what size it's at these days. 01:53:17 <nirik> it should have freed up some room. 01:53:42 <brunowolff> That also depends on the compression level chosen and that might not be real high. 01:54:05 <zcat> even 3% of a 4GB iso is quite a bit. (and yeah, live is already squashed) 01:54:07 <nirik> it was 7, but now is 2. 01:54:54 <nirik> alpha dvd i386 iso is 3.0GB... f11 was 3.5 01:55:50 <nirik> so, at least part of that is likely XZ 01:55:56 <raylu> what compression was used previously? 01:56:02 <nirik> 7 01:56:05 <brunowolff> Native lzma + squashfs didn't make the initial 2.6.32 merge, so we might not be seeing that any time soon. 01:56:09 <raylu> oh, 7z? 01:56:12 <brunowolff> That would help live images a lot. 01:56:39 <nirik> raylu: oh, no, sorry... misunderstood. 01:56:44 <nirik> raylu: it was gzip before. 01:56:50 <raylu> oh. 01:57:13 <nirik> ok, lets hit one more feature here... 01:57:17 <nirik> #topic x86 Support 01:57:25 <nirik> This is likely to be another one people notice. 01:57:34 <brunowolff> Compression at 7 was very slow for rebuilding rpms as part of presto. At 2 it's much faster. 01:57:35 <nirik> For f12 you will see packages that are .i686 01:58:00 <nirik> -march=i686 -mtune=atom 01:58:01 <fenris02> are there any .i386 or .i586 packages remaining? 01:58:07 <nirik> is used for compiling 32bit packages. 01:58:18 <nirik> fenris02: there shouldn't be. It should be all i686 01:58:28 <fenris02> oooh, =atom? not even =generic? 01:58:47 <nirik> atom helped most things and helped atom (think netbooks) a fair bit. 01:58:57 <nirik> so, it was best to just go to that rather than generic. 01:59:00 <fenris02> cool 01:59:19 <nirik> so, what this means is that F12 will not support some very old processors anymore. 02:00:01 <nirik> #topic Q&A 02:00:12 <nirik> ok, thats a quick overview of the features. ;) 02:00:21 <nirik> Anyone have any questions on any of them on the list? 02:00:30 <nirik> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList 02:01:43 <raylu> any benchmaks on XZ? a quick google didn't give me much 02:01:47 <nirik> Lots of nice features this cycle as always. 02:01:50 <raylu> not that i really care 02:02:06 <nirik> raylu: there was discussion on the fedora-devel list recently with some benchmarks. 02:02:09 <fenris02> raylu, marginally better compression than bzip2, with *MUCH* less cpu/ram needed 02:02:52 <fenris02> fedoraplanet users have a few tables for comparisons too 02:03:10 <nirik> yeah... 02:03:12 <nirik> http://www.advogato.org/person/badger/ 02:03:31 <zcat> raylu, i did some half-ass benchmarks earlier today: http://fpaste.org/uqLw/ was curious about all the hoopla 02:03:50 <nirik> there is also an issue with xz and ppc. Hopefully that will get solved before f12 releases. 02:04:18 <nirik> well, it's not ppc per se, deltarpm rather. 02:04:54 <brunowolff> The output of xz is arch endian dependent. This caused probelms for noarch packages which could be built and used on 02:05:06 <brunowolff> arches of different endianness. 02:05:23 <nirik> right. 02:06:40 <nirik> ok, I guess if there isn't any further questions, we can adjorn to #fedora or #fedora-social. ;) 02:06:48 <fenris02> thanks nirik 02:06:57 <BounceCat> thx Nirik. useful for me (not very involved) to see info from someone deeply involved, plus q & a 02:07:21 <nirik> happy to help out. F12 promises to be a nice release. ;) 02:07:32 <zcat> rhel6ish too. thanks. 02:07:52 <nirik> #endmeeting