Kernel

Fedora 28 habilita por primera vez un número de características de ahorro de energía de mejoras en la duración de la batería de los portátiles. Estos cambios se encuentran en los paquetes base y por tanto todos los usuarios obtendrán automáticamente estas mejoras al modernizar. Como resultado, los portátiles con Fedora tendrán una mayor autonomía.

Fedora 28 añade mantenimiento para Thunderbolt - un interfaz desarrollado por Intel el cual concede conexión de periféricos externos a un equipo.

Devices connected via Thunderbolt are DMA masters, which means they can read system memory directly without interference from the computer’s operating system or even CPU. To mitigate the security risk this type of access poses, there are four available security levels for communication, which are set by system firmware:

Starting with version 4.13, the Linux kernel provides an interface through sysfs which enables userspace query about the security level, the status of any connected devices, and to authorize devices if the security level demands it. The active security level must normally be selected before booting via a BIOS/EFI option, but it is interesting to note that the none option will likely be removed in the future. This would mean that connected Thunderbolt devices would not work unless authorized by the user from within the running operating system.

For this reason, Fedora 28 implements full Thunderbolt 3 support. In order to avoid compromising the security, there are two userspace components working together to enable Thunderbolt: a system service (boltd) and a component in GNOME Shell. The shell component will automatically enroll (authorize and store in an internal database) any new connected devices using boltd only if the current user is an administrator and if the session is unlocked. After the device has been authorized once, its information is stored in the database and it will be authorized automatically on subsequent connections.