Apr/May Fedora kernel release overview

[Josh Boyer]

Hi All,

A brief release overview of the past several weeks below.  If you have
any questions, please chime in!

F19:

Currently at 3.13.11 but should be rebasing to the 3.14.4 kernel that
has been in updates-testing very soon.

F20:

Currently at 3.14.4.  Nothing pending.  The upstream stable maintainer
has been behind in doing stable releases and still has several hundred
patches to wade through.  More 3.14.y updates will be coming as he
works through the backlog.

Hans has been working on several backlight issues in F20 (and F19).
There are a number of models fixed, but several still remain.  If you
are having backlight issues, take a look at his blog post on how to
debug these:

http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/13889.html

Many thanks to the reporters and testers on the existing bugs, and
especially to Hans!

Rawhide (F21):

Currently at 3.15.0-0.rc5.git3.1.  Continuing towards 3.15 final.

We've had several packaging changes in rawhide over the past few
weeks.  The kernel-core/kernel-modules split landed and has, from all
indications, been much of a non-event after the first few days.  That
is good to see, since it should be minimal impact.

We also enabled two features that Kyle McMartin provided.  The first
is that the kernel packages will now have Provides(foo.ko) included
for every kernel module the package provides.  That lets us switch
Requires from specific kernel packages (like kernel-modules-extra) to
Requires on the specific kernel modules needed.  With that we can move
modules between packages more freely without breaking dependencies in
the userspace packages that need certain modules.

Kyle's other feature was to compress the installed modules with xz.
The kmod utility has been able to handle compressed modules for quite
some time.  This actually has significant space savings on the
installed size, and the performance impact on module loading is pretty
negligible.  Combined with the kernel packaging split, this should
make the Cloud people rather happy.  Thanks Kyle!

As I mentioned above, if you have any questions or comments, please
feel free to ask on the list.

josh