Feisty Fawn | The next Ubuntu version

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Thursday the latest version of Ubuntu will be released and will be available through free download. Codenamed Feisty Fawn, Ubuntu 7.04 tries to expand its customer base adding some server oriented features. The two most important additions in the Ubuntu server edition are virtualization and a new management tool.

Feisty Fawn will support Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology that was recently added officially to the Linux kernel. KVM allows to run separate disk images of operating systems dedicating to each image the needed resources. To use this feature, Feisty Fawn will have to be installed on hardware that supports x86 virtualization (the most recent AMD and Intel chips).

The attention dedicated to the servers is reflected also by the support added for the VMI technology. The latter is used to optimize the performance of systems that use VMware to run virtual computers (virtual machines).

To achieve this result Ubuntu uses an extra layer, paravirt-ops, that adds the support for multiple virtual machines tools. Feisty Fawn will be the first Linux distribution to support VMI and has also included the support for another virtual machines technology, Xen.

Another addition for server oriented users is a new management tool that will facilitate the maintenance of installed software. Using this tool the server administrator can easily deploy upgrades of Ubuntu and automatically take care of the dependency check. Feisty Fawn also improved the Ubuntu handling of remote software installation making the process even more secure.