Fedora 16 dials up cloud and virtualization capabilities.

Test Lab

Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Thomas Drilling

Fedora 16 comes with some desktop improvements, but for admins, the real story is about virtualization.

The newest version of Fedora is jam-packed with the latest basic technologies. Because the Fedora project is the test bed for Red Hat's enterprise distributions, administrators can take a sneak preview at technologies intended for later use in RHEL and RHEV.

Fedora 16 continues to occupy its place as a pioneer of Linux technology, with key features such as Linux kernel 3.1 and Gnome 3.2.1. The Fedora-customized Gnome version 3.2.1 has what it takes to rocket up to the top of the must-have chart for non-KDE users – and to take users away from Ubuntu in the wake of the problems with Ubuntu's Unity desktop. The Gnome version that comes with Fedora 16 is definitely a more convincing package than Unity; however, from an administrator's point of view, the pillars of Gnome 3.2.1, including desktop features such as the integration of online accounts, are probably not the most important aspects. Instead, administrators and developers will be more interested in the development tools that Fedora 16 includes, such as Perl 5.14, the GCC Python plugins, the Haskell platform, and D2 – the latest version of the D programming language – or the SELinux access control system, which Fedora enables by default. But at the top of the administrator's list has to be kernel 3.1, with its new KVM and Xen functionality, and Fedora 16's above average collection of virtualization and cloud computing tools.

New Kernel 3.1

Much of the professional attention to Fedora 16 will fall on the new Linux kernel 3.1. The first thing to notice is that Fedora doesn't automatically benefit from the changes to the Btrfs filesystem, such as the modified locking mechanisms, which mainly provide more speed. The Red Hat developers toyed with the idea of making Btrfs the standard filesystem but decided to stay with ext4; the main reason for keeping with ext4 is the shortage of repair tools for Btrfs, as well as the conclusion that

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