Fedora Linux 45 approved for November 3 release with kmscon, Stratis installer support

Fedora Linux 45 has received final approval following a successful Go/No-Go meeting and will ship on November 3, 2026. The release introduces two notable user-facing changes: kmscon replaces the legacy fbcon kernel driver for virtual consoles, providing a modern userspace implementation, and the Anaconda installer gains optional Stratis storage configuration for simplified local storage management.

Beyond the immediate release, Fedora's technical leadership is advancing multiple structural initiatives. The Atomic Fusion Bootable Image Unification effort—encompassing Atomic, CoreOS, Hummingbird, and IoT variants—has temporarily relocated development to GitHub on a Konflux tenant to work around integration friction between Konflux and Forgejo. The Fedora Atomic Initiative officially concludes with Fedora 45. Looking further ahead, FESCo is reviewing change proposals for Fedora 46 including a Rust rewrite of usermode's userhelper/consolehelper, tzdata slim format conversion, and PHP 8.6, plus Python 3.16 for Fedora 47.

Fedora 45 release engineering and Atomic Fusion architecture

• Virtual console modernization: Fedora 45 switches from the kernel fbcon framebuffer driver to kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator using kernel mode-setting, eliminating a legacy kernel subsystem from the boot path.
• Installer storage expansion: Anaconda gains native Stratis configuration options, enabling layered local storage management with thin provisioning and snapshot capabilities during initial system installation.
• Atomic Fusion CI workaround: The bootable image unification project temporarily builds seed images on GitHub using a Konflux tenant rather than Forgejo, due to unresolved service account and infrastructure integration blockers between the two platforms.
• Release validation scope: Final testing covered Release Candidates RC-1.3 and RC-1.4 across Workstation, KDE, Server, Cloud, and ARM editions, with blocker bug triage completed for all target variants.
• EPEL 10 maintenance burden: The distribution backported approximately 300 CVE fixes for WebKitGTK in EPEL 10, reflecting extended security maintenance commitments for enterprise-adjacent repositories.

Why it matters

The kmscon transition removes a longstanding kernel framebuffer dependency from Fedora's default configuration, potentially influencing other distributions evaluating userspace console alternatives. For enterprise and cloud deployments, the Stratis integration in Anaconda lowers the barrier to adopting advanced storage features at install time rather than post-configuration. The Atomic Fusion unification effort, if successful, would consolidate Fedora's fragmented container-native and immutable variants under a single bootable image pipeline—though the temporary GitHub migration signals persistent CI/CD infrastructure challenges in the Forgejo ecosystem that may affect other projects relying on self-hosted Forgejo instances with Konflux.