Fedora upgrades ARM support, now treats it as x86’s equal

Fedora 20 was released today, with support for ARM as a primary architecture. While x86 will still be the default for most Fedora users, classifying ARM as a primary architecture means that "it receives the same amount of attention that the x86 and x86-64 releases get," Fedora Project release notes say.

When ARM was treated as a secondary architecture, new versions of Fedora could be released if there were problems with ARM but not x86.

"Build failures on [primary] architectures are fatal: no packages push to the repositories if they fail to build for a primary architecture," the Fedora Project notes. "To put it simply: These are the architectures for which Fedora will delay a release if they are not functional. Fedora package maintainers are required to make sure that their package builds properly for this architecture (or is properly ExcludeArch'd)."

"ARM is rapidly growing in stature and already dominates the mobile world," the Fedora announcement said. "Beyond mobile and the maker movement, ARM shows great promise as a powerful and cost-effective technology for the server world, leading to primary support from Fedora to satisfy end users and developers targeting the ARM platform."

Version 20 of the free, Linux-based operating system comes out just a little bit after the 10th anniversary of the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project. First released on November 6, 2003, Fedora was initially based on the code of Red Hat Linux. Today, Fedora is partly a testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the product that turned Red Hat into a billion-dollar-a-year company.

In addition to improved ARM support, Fedora's announcement details improvements for cloud and virtualization deployments, developers, and desktop users. New "first-class cloud images" are "well-suited to running as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack." Another new feature makes it easier to take snapshots of virtual machines.

Developers will appreciate WildFly 8, which was previously called JBoss Application Server. The software "makes it possible to run Java EE 7 applications with significantly higher speed. It boasts an optimized boot process that starts services concurrently, preventing unnecessary waits, and taps into the power of multi-core processors. Additionally, WildFly takes an aggressive approach to memory management and keeps its memory footprint exceptionally small compared to other JVMs."

Ruby on Rails 4.0 is also included in Fedora 20.

For desktop users, GNOME 3.10 brings "a new music application (gnome-music), a new maps application (gnome-maps), a revamp for the system status menu, and Zimbra support in Evolution."