Fedora 11 was released on date June 9, 2009 after a lot of delays caused by bugs in the installer. This new version of fedora is one of the best releases from fedora 1.
The main features are:
- 20 seconds boot
- EXT4 used by default
- Finger print reader capacity enabled on gdm and screen savers
- Fixes on QEMU and KVM integration
- Kernel 2.6.29 with 2.6.30 backport
- Realtime kernel feature, less battery consumption!
- AES-256 use with XTS-256 by default for whole hard drive cypher
- Yum presto (Delta RPMS)
- Per application independent volume control
- DNS Security
- Less memory consumption
- KDE 4.2 (Available from fedora 9 in updates)
- Firefox 3.5
Next… a review of these features…
Fedora 11 certainly is one of the major advances that this project has released from fedora 1.
Fedora 9 begun a hard work to implement new a unknown features and programs like KDE4, and ext4dev filesystem. This release was pretty unstable. But this release opened the door for a fedora 10 release, a good stable release.
Fedora 11 could be called as the consolidation of all these new technologies and the debut of new ones.
What is ext4, and why is so important?
ext4 is a filesystem type based on ext3. Ext4 uses an “extents” mechanism, who enable the filesystem to write contiguous information directly on data section without having a lot of inodes referencing it.
Here is how it works:
ext3 uses a “inode” section and “data” section. At the inode section, the inodes referee the chunks on data section associated to the file. This chunk commonly have static size and could not be contiguous.
ext4 have the power to save this chunks in a contiguous space with a only one reference, and if you want to read big files, the disk will going to do less “seeks”, this is because the data will have the tendency to be more contiguous.
Ext4 have another features…
The read/write effective throughput is increased.
Fingerprint Reader
Fedora 11 have a new support for a lot of fingerprint readers. This could be used at login time and with the screen saver.
I tested a “Microsoft (R) Fingerprint Reader”, model 4000u and an UPEK integrated on a laptop, and work fine and without troubles. There is no need for a major configuration or extra installation to work.
We must remember that replace password by fingerprint could be a security issue, there is some attacks on this fingerprint readers who enable the attacker to gain access.
Kernel Realtime
The kernel realtime is a very good feature for laptops. this enable you to save battery doing less hard drive rutinary reads.
AES-XTS-PLAIN 512
On fedora 10, the use of AES-CBC-ESSIV was a limit for the hard drive speed on encrypted LVM partition. Now AES-XTS-PLAIN is used. And, explained in a recent story, XTS dont have to rewrite subsequent blocks on block modification.
| Version: 1 Cipher name: aes Cipher mode: xts-plain Hash spec: sha1 Payload offset: 4040 MK bits: 512 |
Delta RPMS (Yum Presto)
Presto is a mechanism that provide RPM’s files only with the difference between one version and another version. This comes by default on F11 and see the results:
| Size of all updates downloaded from Presto-enabled repositories: 52M Size of updates that would have been downloaded if Presto wasn’t enabled: 335M This is a savings of 85 percent |
Saving 5/6 of the bandwidth…
In addition, using RPM 4.2, the install of these RPM packages where very rapid.
Firefox 3.5
Firefox 3.5 comes with substantive fixes on efficiency and stability. In my particular case, my FF3.5 memory consumption was less than 50% of the FF3.0
Firefox 3.5b4 is a beta, however, is much more stable and fastest than the called “stable” firefox 3.0.10
There is no need to say that Fedora 11 reach the expectations of the people. Is very robust, stable, and fast.
Is friendly, and with a configuration guide like this, this is possible to have a very good experience.
I’ve installed on a computer with a NVIDIA graphic card, and was a very cool experience. In a few hours i’ll install fedora 11 on my laptop with ATI (i know… there is a problem with fglrx).
Ah, another detail about this distribution: We dont recommend to upgrade/preupgrade from Fedora 10 or 9. If you have F9 or F10 with disk cypher or ext3, you wont going to enjoy all the new features. — WE RECOMMEND A CLEAN INSTALL —