Distribution-wide Changes

Before Fedora 32, The Fedora Project was estimating the number of installed Fedora systems by counting the unique IP addresses which access updates from the official mirrors. This approach is highly inaccurate for multiple reasons, such as undercounting due to NAT and overcounting due to short DHCP leases and laptops moving between different network connections, and this approach also doesn’t allow for distinguishing between Fedora variants. At the same time, accurate usage metrics are highly useful for any software project that wants to serve its community and remain relevant, and so The Fedora Project has been exploring ways to obtain more useful information without compromising privacy of its users.

In Fedora 32, when the installed system contacts one of the official Fedora mirrors, it provides the following information ("user agent"):

The countme variable is used by Fedora Project to determine the age of the system. The variable has four possible values:

Using this system, The Fedora Project can measure the usage levels of various combinations of architectures and variants and collect data short and long term usage of each variant. At the same time, this system avoids collecting any identifying information about any client system.

If you wish to disable this behavior, change the value of the countme boolean in DNF configuration. See the dnf.conf(5) man page for details.

Since Fedora 32, the operating system to be installed from the physical optical media will not need to be tested before the general availability. However, issues regarding physical media boot will still be treated as blocker bugs.

The change will affect the following images:

The change aims to address the trend of ever decreasing amount of new computers and laptops with CD/DVD drives, and errors that installation using this media entails.

As a result, the Fedora QE Team and community testers will have more capacity to test parts of Fedora that are far more visible and exposed to end users.

The clang-libs package no longer includes individual component libraries like libclangBasic.so, libclangAST.so and so on. Packages that depend on the clang libraries are now linked to libclang-cpp.so.

As a result of this change:

An updated version (3.2.0) of Free Pascal Compiler is now available with Fedora 32. With the updated Free Pascal Compiler you can now build Arch64 and ppc64le packages. Also, the Free Pascal Compiler now supports new architectures. As a result, the programs that are compiled using FPC are available to run on more architectures that Fedora supports.

Previously, users were created in %pre section by calling the commands getent, useradd, and groupadd.

With this update, users are defined in the sysusers.d format. It adds an rpm package Provides generator to create user(<name>) and group(<name>) virtual Provides for packages with sysusers.d files.

An rpm package Provides generator is added to generate user(<name>) and group(<name>) for packages with sysusers.d files.

As a benefit:

In Fedora 32, core packages (packages that are used to build the minimal container image) have had all of their scriptlet calls (%pre, %post, %preun, %postun) removed. This means the entire install process of the container image is now declarative and transparent to packaging tools such as rpm, ostree, or composer, the installation is faster, and keeping this approach in the future will allow for additional optimizations and features.

Packages can still make changes to the system during installation by placing files in specific locations that trigger actions.

The earlyoom service is now enabled by default in Fedora Workstation.

The earlyoom service monitors system memory usage. If free memory falls below a set limit, earlyoom terminates an appropriate process to free up memory. As a result, the system does not become unresponsive for long periods of time in low-memory situations.

The following is the default earlyoom configuration:

For more information, see the earlyoom man page.