Brief update on Fedora 17 and plans

[Phil Knirsch]

Hi everyone.

We're progressing nicely towards Fedora 17 Alpha right now. We've had a 
few setbacks in the last few months with the gcc-4.7 switch, hub 
diskspace overflows and other things, but we're closing in to getting 
everything built for Alpha in Mid march.

As we're closing in on Fedora 17 Alpha now i also wanted to give a quick 
heads up about the yaboot to grub2 switch we're doing for Fedora 17. As 
you might know we've originally planed it for Fedora 16. Patches had 
been submitted upstream by IBM for that, but they didn't make it into a 
release in time. So we decided to pull the plug for the grub2 switch for 
Fedora 16 and focused on stabilizing Fedora on Power for that release 
which we think really paid off.

For Fedora 17 though things look a lot better now. The newest grub2 
release which is scheduled to be released in the next weeks will contain 
all the patches and some fixes on top of that. Right now we're working 
and building an interim version of grub2 with those patches to progress 
on composing and generating images to make sure everything works in time 
we're getting to Alpha (currently planed mid March). Once the new grub2 
has been officially released we'll build a new version of it and use 
that from then on to have the same version of grub2 on all architectures.

This change will bring Power basically in line with x86 bootloading and 
make things a lot easier for the anaconda team on Power in the future. 
The one and only drawback is that grub2 seems to have issues with Apple 
PPC hardware. According to Google searches some folks report success 
using grub2 on Apple PPC hardware, so if someone from the community with 
the appropriate hardware and debugging/testing/fixing skills would be 
able to provide the necessary fixes we'd be more than glad to include 
them, and if applicable forward them to upstream.

I'll send out an update once we get closer to Alpha and/or have first 
testable images available.

Thanks & regards, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
Supervisor Core Services     | Fax.:  +49-711-96437-111
Red Hat GmbH                 | Email: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch at redhat.com>
Hauptstaetterstr. 58         | Web:   http://www.redhat.com/
D-70178 Stuttgart, Germany