Fedora Linux 45 Ships on November 3 After Two NO-GO Calls, Replacing the Kernel Console With kmscon and Dropping Two NetworkManager VPN Plugins
Fedora 45 was announced November 3 after two NO-GO calls from its October 20 target; Linuxiac and Phoronix list kmscon, enforced RPM signatures and restricted ptrace.
Overview
Fedora Linux 45 was announced on 3 November, according to Fedora Magazine, whose announcement post is dated that day. Linuxiac says the release came “after two postponements from the original October 20 target”, and Phoronix says it was “challenged by two release delays”. Coverage from Linuxiac, Phoronix and Fedora Magazine describes changes that developers and administrators meet directly, among them a userspace console, enforced RPM signature checking, restricted ptrace, a new major Podman version and two removed VPN plugins. The Herald described the beta in an earlier report.
How the date slipped
Dates in this section and the next are the dates Phoronix stamped on its reports, in US Eastern time. In a report stamped 15 October, Phoronix wrote that there was “an early release target date for Fedora 45 of 20 October and built-in contingency dates of 27 October and 3 November”. The 20 October date was declared a “NO-GO” “due to no release candidate media being published in time”, Phoronix said, citing a confirmation posted to the fedora-devel list.
A second “NO-GO” followed. In a report stamped 22 October, Phoronix said Fedora 45 “was delayed by at least one more week due to open blocker bugs”. It listed four accepted blockers: “an update needed to mitigate issues with eMudhra, Fedora Server 45 AArch64 image exceeding its maximum size, LVM auto-activation failing after upgrading to Fedora 45 on a LUKS-backed PV setup, and finally KDE Plasma Discover installing outdated native RPM packages from the Fedora 44 repository”. It also named three proposed blockers under consideration, one about network configuration during installation and two about encrypted Stratis storage, and gave 3 November as the new planned date.
In a report stamped 29 October, Phoronix said the Go/No-Go meeting declared Fedora 45 a “GO” with the latest release candidate builds, that “those bugs were fixed over the past week”, and that the Fedora 45 RC 1.4 images were the ones to be mirrored on 3 November.
What changes for developers and administrators
The console is the most visible change. Linuxiac says Fedora 45 replaces the in-kernel virtual console, fbcon, with kmscon, a userspace implementation, and lists improved Unicode and font rendering and better keyboard layout handling as benefits. Phoronix reported on 3 March that the kmscon proposal had been moved from Fedora 44 to Fedora 45.
Two security defaults change. According to Linuxiac, RPM package signature verification is now enforced by default, so packages need valid signatures and digests before installation unless verification is overridden, and ptrace permissions are restricted for unprivileged users, with full debugging functionality available again “when appropriate development tools are installed”. Phoronix lists the same two changes and adds “expecting package builds to be reproducible”.
Toolchain versions come from Linuxiac and Phoronix. Linuxiac lists RPM 6.1, Python 3.15, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.44, LLVM 23, Go 1.27 and Perl 5.44, plus Podman 6, Pandas 3 and Lua 5.5. Phoronix names Go 1.27, Python 3.15, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.44, LLVM 23 and RPM 6.1. On the kernel, Phoronix says Fedora 45 ships with Linux 7.2 and that a Linux 7.3 update “will be rolling out soon”.
Fedora Magazine flags Podman 6. Its post on the KDE edition says Podman 6 brings “significant API and CLI breaking changes” and that “Depending on how you use Podman, this change may significantly affect you”. The post on the Atomic Desktops lists Podman 6.0 and 6.1 and says “Support for slirp4netns and the BoltDB backend have been removed”. The same post says the Atomic Desktop installer images now use the Anaconda WebUI and are built with Image Builder.
On upgrade, two NetworkManager VPN plugins disappear. A Fedora Magazine post by Aoife Moloney and Beniamino Galvani says NetworkManager-vpnc and NetworkManager-fortisslvpn are unmaintained and that their published issues “allow LPE through malicious VPN profiles” (LPE is local privilege escalation). An upgrade to Fedora 45 removes them automatically if installed, while Fedora 43 and 44 installations keep them without further updates. The post names NetworkManager-openconnect as the replacement for Fortinet SSLVPN and NetworkManager-libreswan for Cisco IPsec (IKEv1), and says the libreswan route may require enabling the deprecated IKEv1 protocol.
Storage and desktop editions differ. The announcement says “One of the biggest highlights in Fedora Linux 45 is integrated support for Stratis storage right inside the Anaconda installer.” Linuxiac says the KDE edition has Plasma 6.8.2, while the Atomic Desktops post says Kinoite ships Plasma 6.7 and that “Plasma 6.8 is expected to land right after the release”. The Herald previously reported on the removal of the Plasma X11 session and a FESCo vote on reverting it.
What We Don’t Know
The four Fedora Magazine release posts cited here do not name kmscon, the ptrace restriction or RPM signature enforcement in their article text; the announcement’s toolchain bullet gives no version numbers. Those details rest on Linuxiac and Phoronix. In the Phoronix reports cited, the three proposed blockers are not followed up individually, so it is not stated which were fixed before the 29 October “GO”.
Early user reports on kmscon are unresolved. In the announcement’s Fedora Discussion thread, a user posting as dannybpng wrote on 9 November that after upgrading to Fedora 45 “I could get to a different virtual console, but could not get back to the graphical login screen”. Another user, glb, replied with links to two kmscon issues, 604 and 616. Neither issue mentions Fedora in its text (or, for 604, in its comments): the first lists Gentoo as its environment and the second an Arch Linux package, and both were open when the Herald read them on 11 November. Whether they share a cause with the Fedora report is not established by the cited sources, and the thread data shows no staff title for either user.